‘Hi,’ said Patrick.
The girl/woman looked at him for the first time. ‘Who are you?’
‘Patrick Fort,’ said Patrick. ‘Are you Mrs Galen?’
‘No, I’m fucking not,’ she spat vehemently. ‘And neither is she.’ She parted the shrubbery. Patrick noticed a smallish stone next to his foot.
‘Here,’ he said, and held it out to her.
The girl looked at him suspiciously, then came over and snatched it from his hand like a wary monkey. ‘Cheers,’ she said, and threw it through an upstairs window. It made a neat black hole and a web of white cracks.
‘The police are coming,’ he pointed out, and she cocked her head at the sound of approaching sirens.
‘Bollocks.’
‘I thought you called them?’
‘Yeah, right,’ she snorted, and walked over to the six-foot wooden fence that surrounded the garden. ‘You going to gimme a leg up or what?’
Patrick wheeled his bike across the lawn and edged his way through the shrubs. He hesitated, then went to put his hands around her waist so he could lift her up.
‘Watch where you’re putting your hands, mate!’ she said, and he took a step backwards. ‘Like this.’ She made a stirrup with her fingers.
He flinched as she stepped into his interlaced fingers, and then almost slung her clean over the fence, she was so light, and he was so keen to be rid of her. He wiped his hands hard on the seat of his jeans.
‘You coming?’ she said from the other side.
Was he? Patrick stood for a moment, weighing up his options and objectives. He wanted information. The woman in the house wouldn’t speak to him, whereas the girl in the garden had. She was probably his best bet.
‘OK,’ he said.
He’d never escaped over a fence before and wasn’t quite sure of the procedure. He propped his bike against it, then stepped on the crossbar and lay precariously along the fence, with the planking digging a long line of discomfort from his shoulder to his balls, while he gripped with one hand and his feet. He teetered there, and stretched an arm back down to grip the crossbar. He should have put the bike over the fence first.
‘Come on!’
‘I’m getting my bike,’ he explained.
‘There’s no time!’
Two uniformed policemen walked briskly round the side of the house and Patrick realized too late that he’d chosen the wrong team. They saw him and started to jog across the lawn.
‘Oi!’ shouted one. ‘Stay right there!’
A rush of adrenaline took Patrick completely by surprise. It fired a stream of white-hot excitement through his body. No video game had ever made him feel this way, and he laughed at the policemen as they speeded up across the grass.
But the bike anchored him on the wrong side of the fence. He should really leave it.
He didn’t. He hauled it up, one-handed – his shoulder burning with effort and his chest and balls shrieking to be allowed off the narrow wooden ridge. He would have overbalanced back into the garden, except that the girl who wasn’t Mrs Galen grabbed two handfuls of him – his jeans and his hoodie – and provided a counterweight as he lifted his bike up to join him, until his weight shifted and they both rolled off the fence and dropped on to the ground, only missing the girl because she jumped out of the way with a shriek.
He lay in the alleyway, winded and staring at the same sky that had been there the day of the monkey bars and the swing.
The first of the policemen hit the other side of the wooden fence with a grunt. The girl yelled, ‘Run! Run!’ then took her own advice and disappeared from his field of vision.
Patrick was on his feet in an instant, running alongside his bike until he had the presence of mind to jump into the saddle, like a Dodge City bank robber on to a getaway pony.
He heard the police shouting something behind him, but never looked back, and very soon his pedalling took him to a calmer, quieter place – as it so often had.
He caught up with the girl in the park down at the bottom of the hill. She was walking now, not running, and staying close to the shadows of the rhododendrons.
He slowed his bike beside her and said, ‘Hi.’
She put a hand to her chest. ‘Shit! You nearly gave me a heart attack!’
But she started laughing then, and didn’t stop until she was crying.
‘Shit,’ she said again. ‘That bitch!’ She wiped her eyes, leaving dark streaks from her eyes to her temples. Patrick waited until she’d finished.
‘You want to get a drink?’ she said.
‘I don’t drink,’ Patrick told her.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.
They went into the Claude on Albany Road. ‘You got any money?’ she said, so Patrick bought her a rum and Coke, and himself a Coke without the rum.
‘You really don’t drink,’ said the girl. ‘Why?’
‘No reason,’ he said.
‘Liar.’
He wondered how she’d known, but said nothing else. They sat at a table near the door and she clinked his glass with hers. ‘Bottoms up,’ she said.
She drank half her rum and Coke in one go. ‘What was your name again?’
He was practised at the answer now and told her with barely a pause.
‘Thanks for the leg up over the fence.’
He nodded. ‘What’s yours?’
‘My what?’
‘Name.’
She said, ‘Lexi,’ and drained her glass. ‘Want another one?’
‘I haven’t finished this one.’
She hid a burp behind her fist, then reached over, took his Coke from his hand and swallowed it in three swift gulps.
‘Want another one now?’
He bought her another one, and a coffee for himself, because he thought it would be cheaper, but it wasn’t.
‘You’re not Samuel Galen’s wife?’ Patrick said as he sat down with the drinks.
She took a gulp and shook her head. ‘He was my dad.’
‘But she’s not his wife either?’
‘She’s just a fucking gold-digger,’ she said. ‘You got a fag?’
‘No.’
Lexi took out a pouch of tobacco and rolled her own.
‘Sitting there in a bloody mansion with bloody great Beemers out the front, while I’m kipping on a mate’s couch above a fucking pet shop. Got a light?’
‘No.’
Lexi went to the bar to ask for one and the barman told her there was no smoking in the pub.
‘Jesus Christ!’ she said, and yanked the roll-up from her lips and stormed back to her seat.
‘Bastard says there’s no smoking! In a fucking pub!’
‘It’s the law,’ Patrick pointed out.
‘I know it’s the law.’
‘Because of passive smoking.’
‘Thank you, Chancellor of the Exchequer.’
‘I’m not the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’
‘You don’t say.’
Patrick was confused because he plainly had said.
‘Stupid fucking rules,’ she said and poked the roll-up into her cleavage. ‘What’s wrong with your hand?’
Patrick looked at his knuckles, which were red, with long yellow blisters already coming.
The shrubbery.
‘Conifers,’ he said. ‘I’m allergic.’
‘Allergies fucking blow,’ said Lexi enthusiastically. ‘I have a million of them. Fish, cats, eggs – you name it. Not trees though. Does it hurt?’
‘It itches.’
Patrick was finding it hard to keep up with Lexi’s flood of words and emotions and expletives. She seemed to say anything and everything that popped into her mind. All Patrick had to do was try to sift the gold from the grit. But he wasn’t sure which was which, and so let her stream of consciousness wash over him in the hope that he could sort it out later.