We climbed so high into the sky I could see the river shining on the other side of the airport. The runways stretched out into the grassy hills like fingers pointing to faraway places. Blue mountains rose up on the other side of the river. I thought, If we keep going up, we’ll be in space. I clung tight to Eric’s massive arms.

Then the picture began to come into focus. The green splurge of ground became individual trees. The brick aeroplane of the estate became individual houses. We were coming down. I tried to spot Stealth Street. For a mad moment, I imagined the helicopter setting us down in our back garden. Mum would look through the kitchen window and see a helicopter landing, and then I’d step out and say, ‘Surprise!’

But that’s not where we were going. We swerved left, heading towards a little tarmac road leading to a place where sunlight sparked off mounds of glass and metal.

The R-U-Recycling scrapyard.

The helicopter’s tail lurched back and forth as it tried to hover in one spot. It wasn’t coming down. But we were. They were lowering the metal cable that Eric and I were dangling from.

For the first time in a while, I could hear something louder than helicopter blades.

I looked down.

Beneath my feet was something way more frightening than a sixty-metre drop. Beneath my feet – and getting nearer by the second – was a metal crusher. Huge steel teeth were gnashing at the empty air, getting ready to chew Eric to pieces. And me along with him.

Because no one knew I was there. They thought they were going to destroy a robot. Not a mostly fleshand-blood kid.

‘Eric!’ I gasped. ‘We’re going to be crushed to death!’

Eric tucked up his knees, the way you do when you’re going to dive-bomb in the pool.

‘Great. Well, that’s going to give us an extra one and a half seconds of life.’

I couldn’t just hear the noise of the crusher now. I could smell the diesel from its turbines and catch the wind from its exhaust. We were just a few metres from its jaws.

Eric leaned to the left. The cable swung a little. He leaned to the right. It swung a bit more. He rocked from side to side. The cable swung wider and wider. What was he trying to do? I looked up. The helicopter was really struggling. Maybe it would give up and fly us out of danger? Maybe it would crash.

Eric kept rocking and swinging, reaching further and further out. Finally I looked down and saw that we were swinging out over a skip full of tree branches and grass cuttings. We skimmed back across the crusher, into the air on the other side and back across the garden-waste skip. And that’s when Eric dropped me.

I landed on a pillow of stinging nettles. But I didn’t notice the stings until later. What I noticed was that I was not dead. Because Eric had saved my life.

Eric had saved my life, but now he was going to lose his. OK, he doesn’t exactly have a life because he’s a machine – but, if someone saves your life, it doesn’t matter what they’re made of. You can’t just stand back and watch them being crushed into a metal cube.

The sound of the helicopter was getting quieter and quieter. That could only mean they’d dropped Eric and were now flying away. I flung myself over the side of the skip and ran to the crusher. There was a big steel handle with a perished rubber cover, covered in oil. I threw myself at it. I tried to push it up.

The crushing machine spoke: ‘Are you sure you want to close down action now? Closing down action will result in metal object not being crushed.’

‘Yes! Stop! Now!’

The machine went slightly quiet, like it was thinking.

There was a sound like it was raining buckets and kettles. It had let go of Eric. He clattered down the feed slide and landed just a metre from me.

My ears were still ringing, but a voice chainsawed through the sound.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

A woman with a lot of tattoos and a shiny silver helmet was striding towards me, waving her fist.

‘Get away from that thing!’ she shouted, pushing back the visor on her helmet. ‘No unauthorized persons in this yard. What are you doing here?’

‘Oh, you know –’ I shrugged – ‘I just dropped in.’ Which was true after all.

As she got closer, I whispered to Eric, ‘Sit really still. I’ve got a plan that will get us out of here. But you need to sit very still.’

‘You just,’ growled the woman, ‘dropped in?’ She made it sound like the most unbelievable thing anyone had ever said. ‘Well, you’d better just hop out again. This is a dangerous environment. We’re in receipt of an unauthorized robot, which Health and Safety have declared a danger to life and limb.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that’s interesting.’

‘No, it’s not interesting. It’s dangerous. Get out of here.’

‘OK.’ I made as if to leave. ‘Before I go . . . see that suit of armour over there?’ I pointed to Eric. ‘I was wondering if I could take it. For school. We’re doing the Wars of the Roses.’

‘Rusty!’

I thought she was being rude about Eric’s complexion – there are bits of rust on his cheeks – but it turned out to be someone’s name: a man with red hair who came running up from somewhere behind the large-domestic-items skip. He was wearing goggles, and on his back there was a yellow gas canister. In his hand, he was carrying a long metal wand. At the end of the wand was a hissing blue flame. He waved the flame around as he trotted towards us.

‘This is the best flame I’ve ever mixed,’ he said. ‘It will cut through this joker like a hot knife through Nutella. Just you wait and see.’

He bent down over Eric. He was about to start slicing him up! I couldn’t look. It was horrible. Rusty pulled up his goggles and looked at Tattoo Woman.

‘Would you mind moving its head,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the way it’s looking at me. It looks . . . sad.’

Tattoo Woman rolled her eyes. ‘Give me the cutter,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it. I don’t care if it looks at me or not.’

Rusty sighed. ‘OK – I’ll try again . . . I’ve never got the flame this fierce before. I want to try it out.’ He pulled down his goggles and stepped closer to Eric.

‘NOOOO!’ I leaped forward and tried to grab hold of the cutter. It didn’t work. I forgot that I wasn’t wearing my Osprey. Instead of grabbing the cutter, I just nudged it downwards. Blue flames clawed at Eric’s chest, instead of his head.

Rusty jumped back. ‘Whoa – what are you doing?’ he roared. ‘You could’ve burned my leg off!’

‘But this suit of armour could be of great historical importance,’ I said. ‘If you destroy it, you could end up in big trouble.’

‘It’s not a suit of armour. It’s an illegal robot.’

‘Well, we’re doing knights of old in school,’ I said, ‘and that definitely looks like a suit of armour to me. I could take it away. No charge. Then it won’t be cluttering up your yard.’

‘It’s a robot,’ said Rusty. ‘It nearly killed a kid at the airport not half an hour ago. Stand well back.’

I’ve learned that if you keep talking long enough sometimes people just give up. So I started to explain about the Wars of the Roses and what the different parts of a suit of armour are called.

‘Nobody cares about the Wars of the Roses!’ said Tattoo Woman.

‘Controversial,’ I said. ‘Without the Wars of the Roses—’

‘How can it be a suit of armour?’ said Rusty. ‘It’s only got one leg!’

‘Maybe it’s a suit of armour for a one-legged knight,’ I said. ‘Not everyone’s got loads of legs and feet and hands, you know . . .’ As I said this, I lifted my right arm so he could see I had no hand.

Works every time.

Rusty was one hundred per cent embarrassed. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I never thought of that. So. You want this suit of armour? For school? No problem.’

Tattoo Woman was about ninety-three per cent embarrassed. ‘You can borrow a SmartTruck to get him to school, if you like. Make sure you send it straight back though.’

I’d never seen a SmartTruck before. It’s basically a big adjustable seat on wheels. The smart thing is, you don’t have to push it. It synchs with your phone and follows you around. Tattoo Woman slipped the seat under Eric, pressed a few buttons, and it lifted him into place.

‘You take him off to your school,’ she said. ‘The SmartTruck will bring itself back here when you’ve finished. Good luck. Hope you get top marks.’

I’ve saved Eric, I thought. Which is when a police car swung in through the scrap yard gates and did not stop until it was dangerously close to us, right on the ramp of the crusher.

An officer wound down the window and called out, ‘If I could just ask you to turn your crusher on now and put the target in the machine.’

‘What?’ said Tattoo Woman.

‘The robot. We dropped it into the crusher. Can I just ask you to crush it now.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘There’s been a mix-up. It’s not a robot. It’s a suit of armour. From the Wars of the Roses.’

‘No mix-up,’ said the police officer. ‘It’s a highly dangerous, unlicensed robot, which almost killed a kid this morning and subsequently kidnapped him.’

‘That was me!’ I said. ‘And I wasn’t that kidnapped.’

The police officer rolled his eyes.

‘Besides,’ I said, ‘how could it kidnap me? It’s just a suit of armour. Of purely historical interest. It doesn’t even move, does it?’

I said this a little bit louder than normal, to remind Eric not to move.

Finally, and with an air of menace, the police officer got out of his car. He looked down at me and at Eric and snarled, ‘This machine has already caused disruption at the airport. It has distressed the little boy . . .’

I told him that I wasn’t distressed, but he just said, ‘You THINK you’re not distressed now, but you will be later. And you’ll be even more distressed if you don’t follow the instructions and TURN THE CRUSHER ON.’

That’s when I first noticed that Eric is – above all – very eager to please people. Because the moment the police officer said ‘turn the crusher on’, Eric said:

I AM YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT.

Eric reached out and pulled the start lever.

Tattoo Woman told me later they normally do ten different safety checks before starting up the crusher. Eric just pulled the manual override. Thinking about it now, it wasn’t Eric who parked the police car on the crusher’s lifting ramp, was it? It was the police officer. So, when the crusher hoisted the police officer’s car into the air and tilted it towards the mouth of the crusher, that was nothing to do with Eric.

Also, why didn’t the police officer do something, instead of standing there watching as his car was tipped into the crusher mumbling, ‘No, no, no, no, no’ to himself? Did he say or do anything to stop it? No. When the police car lurched off the end of the lift and rolled into the crusher’s jaws, did he push Eric aside and try to put the machine into reverse?

Well, not going to lie – he did try. But Eric is hard to push. The back end of the police car buckled. Inside its huge cage, the crusher woke like some terrible beast. The pistons of its stomach punched upwards. The panels of its side moved in and out. Even the police officer couldn’t help watching, transfixed. It is quite a spectacle. Especially at the end when everything goes very, very quiet, and then there’s one last absolutely deafening CLANG.

A panel opened and, instead of a police car, one beautifully perfect cube of metal about the size of a washing machine slid down the chute. The officer looked down at it. You could still make out the ‘P’ of Police on one of its sides.

That, I thought, is definitely controversial.

‘Why did you do that?’ sobbed the police officer.

I’M SORRY, I CAN’T ANSWER THAT QUESTION.