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this trench. It was amazing; it was so deep. I hung around by the shed while she put her hand out to him.
    “Coming in, Dad?” she said.
    “Has she gone?”
    “She's gone.”
    He ignored her hand and pulled himself up a ladder he had down at one end of the trench. He was all streakedwith mud. He looked hopeless. Pathetic. I'd have liked to push him back in the bloody trench and fill the earth in on top of him, he was so useless. Me and Gill stood there looking at him.
    “Right. Coped with that pretty well, then, didn't I?” Gill snorted and suddenly all three of us started laughing. He coped! At the bottom of a trench, I mean. Then he put his arms around our backs and we sort of led him back into the house. He looked shattered. Me and Gill made him some tea and then we all watched telly for a while be-fore we went to bed.

Anne Fine

    H ow did I tell them? How does anybody tell them? It was a mixture of chance, and being up to here with the sheer awfulness of them not having a clue. (I'm not kidding. I don't think it had even crossed their minds.) I was a wreck from walking through our back door every day after school, practically expecting to see their pale, shocked faces raised to mine. Sooner or later, one of life's meddlers was going to take a swing at them with the old wet sock of truth, and come out with a helpful little “I really thought it was time someone told you.” After all, most of my friends knew. And after Mr. Heffer had soft-soled his way up behind me at the newsstand while I was flicking through something pretty dubious, I was pretty sure all the staff at school were in on it (and half the dinner ladies, if that strange rumor aboutMr. Heffer has any truth to it). I even reckoned Mr. Faroy, the grocer, had guessed, and I'm not sure he even knows quite what we're talking about. So that just left them, really. Mum and Dad.
    Like everyone else, though, I kept putting it off. Not just from cowardice, but from not being sure quite what was driving me towards the dread day of reckoning. I wouldn't be surprised if axe murderers have the same problem. They escape undetected from the scene of the crime, and then each knock, each phone ring, causes such a rush of stomach-clenching fear that in the end they realize one day soon they're going to walk into some police station—any police station—and give themselves up, just to be able to stretch out on their hard prison bed, and breathe in peace. Not the best reason for confessing, perhaps. But good enough. And better than some of the others, like wanting to stop your parents making their tired old jokes about gay presenters on the telly, or simply upset them out of childish spite.
    And I certainly didn't want to upset mine. I'm very fond of them, I really am. (Go on. Have a good laugh. I'll wait till you're ready.) I think they're both softies, if you want to know. And I'm the light of Mum's life. Even at my age, they're still checking on me all the time. “All right, are you, son?” “Good day at school, sweetheart?” That sort of thing. Not that I'm actually looking for chances to whinge about that animal Parker hurling my sandwiches into the art room clay bin, or Lucy Prescott stalking me down corridors. But, if I wanted to, I could.
    But I couldn't tell them this. Each time I geared myself up, I'd get some horror-show vision in my head of how they might take it. You only need half an ear hanging off one side of your head to know how some parents react. Flora knows someone whose mum wailed on for weeks about it all being
her
fault, then threw herself under a bus. That's something nice for Flora's friend to think about all her life. George has a neighbor whose son was banished. Banished! It sounds medieval, but it happened only last year. And I've just read a novel where the father got drunk and cut the little circle of his son's face out of every single family photo-graph, and dropped the whole lot down the toilet. The poor boy pads along to the bathroom