‘What happened when he fell?’
‘I was trying to help him. Trying to get him down, but he panicked and slipped and fell.’
‘He said you were chasing him.’
‘I was chasing him, but when he got into trouble on the quarry wall I was trying to help him.’
‘Why were you chasing him?’
‘I was trying to get to him, then I could walk him home safely. He’d gone silly and run off.’
‘He says that you dragged him to the house to show him a ghost and he tried to escape and you went after him.’
‘But he wanted to see the ghost.’
‘The ghost that you’d invented. To get him to go to the house.’
My mum put her head in her hands. I wished I lived alone in a house on top of a high hill. I’d sleep in the attic. As close to space as possible.
‘I only invented it for him. So he could have fun.’
‘We’ve been in the house. We’ve seen your room.’
‘Is he OK?’
‘Did you set all that up? The table and chairs?’
‘I didn’t steal them.’
‘But you put all that stuff in there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why? What did you and Jake do there?’
‘Read books.’
‘You read books?’
‘Sometimes. Horror books. He liked them.’
‘You took an eight-year-old boy, walked him nearly two miles across town to an abandoned house and read him horror books?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at me for a long time.
‘Is he OK?’ I asked.
‘He’s out of hospital now. Still battered and bruised.’
‘Will you tell him I’m sorry?’
‘What are you sorry about Donald?’
‘That he fell and hurt himself.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘I’m sorry he was scared.’
‘Why was he scared?’
‘He got silly thoughts in his head.’
‘Silly how?’
I didn’t know if I should say it.
‘His friend had told him that I might be a bad man.’
‘What type of bad man?’
‘I don’t know. But suddenly he didn’t want to be friends.’
‘And you were angry about that?’
‘Not angry, sad.’
‘But you were chasing him. A sixteen-year-old takes an eight-year-old to an abandoned house, to see a ghost that he’s invented, and when the young boy gets scared the older boy chases him, so he thinks his only way to escape is to scale a sixty-foot wall. What are we to make of that Donald? How scared must he have been?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘What was it like?’
Whatever I could say to them would only make it worse.