Johnny and the Bomb

"Why does everyone always talk like that?" he said. "It's stupid. You would really watch someone run over by a car because that's what was supposed to happen, would you? Everything we do changes the future, all the time. So we ought to do what's right."

"Don't shout, people are looking at us," said Kirsty.

The trolley bumped over the kerb and started to bounce on some cobbles. They were already out of the town centre.

And there was Paradise Street.

It wasn't very long. There were only ten terraced houses on either side, and some of them were boarded up. The far end was a pair of double wooden gates to a factory. They'd once been painted green, but time and the weather had turned the colour into a sort of mossy grey.

Someone had chalked a set of goalposts on the doors, and half a dozen small boys in knee-length shorts were kicking a ball about.

Joh

About halfway along the street a young man was repairing a motorcycle. Tools lay on a piece of sacking on the pavement. The football emerged from a complicated tackle, hit the spa

"Turn it up, you little devils," said the man, pushing the ball away.

"You never said anything about children," said Kirsty, so quietly that Joh

"It's all going to get blown up?" said Yoless.

Joh

"There wasn't very much detail in the local paper," he said. "They didn't used to put very much in, in case the enemy read it. It was all to do with something they called the war effort. You know ... not wanting to let the enemy know you'd been hurt. There was a photo of a lady with her thumb up saying "Blackbury can take it, Mister Hitler!" but there was hardly anything else about the raid until a couple of years afterwards."

"You mean the government hushed it up?" said Kirsty.

"Makes sense, I suppose," said Yoless gloomily. "I mean, you don't want to say to the enemy, "Hey, you missed your target, have another go"."

The football slammed against the factory gates, rattling them. There didn't seem to be any teams. The ball just went everywhere, surrounded by a mob of small boys.

"I don't see what we could do," said Kirsty. Her voice sounded uneasy, now.

"What? Just now you were telling me I shouldn't do anything," said Joh

"It's different when you see people, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"I suppose it wouldn't work if we just told someone?"

"They'd say "how do you know?" and then you'd probably get shot as a spy," said Yoless. "They used to shoot spies."

Heavy Mental

The man in the khaki uniform turned Bigmac's transistor radio over and over in his hands.

Bigmac watched nervously. There was a police sergeant in the room, and Bigmac was familiar with policemen. But there was a soldier standing by the door, and he had a gun in a holster. And the one sitting down looked tired but had a very sharp expression. Bigmac was not the fastest of thinkers, but it had dawned on him that this was unlikely to be the kind of situation where you got let off with a caution.

"Let's start again," said the seated soldier, who had introduced himself as Captain Harris. "Your name is...?"

Bigmac hesitated. He wanted to say, "You get Ms Partridge, she'll sort it all out, it's not my fault, she says I'm socially dysfunctional", but there was an expression on the captain's face that suggested that this might be a very unfortunate move.

"Simon Wrigley."

"And you say you are fourteen years old and live in-" Captain Harris glanced at his notes, "the Joshua Chen Clement "block" which is near here, you say?"

"You can see it easily," said Bigmac, trying to be helpful. "Or you could do, if it was here."

The captain and the police sergeant glanced at one another.

"It's not here?" said the captain.

"Yes. I don't know why," said Bigmac.

"Tell me again what Heavy Mental is," said the captain.

"They're a neo-punk thrash band," said Bigmac.

"A music band?"

"Er, yes."

"And we would have heard them on the wireless, perhaps?"

"I shouldn't think so," said Bigmac. "Their last single was "I'm going to rip off your head and spit down the hole"."

"Rip off your head-" said the policeman, who was taking notes.

"-and spit down the hole"," said Bigmac helpfully.

"This watch of yours with the numbers on it," said the captain. "I see it's got little buttons, too. What happens if I press them?"

The policeman tried to move away a little.

"The one on the left lights it up so you can see it in the dark," said Bigmac.

"Really? And why would you want to do that?"

"When you wake up in the night and want to know what time it is?" Bigmac suggested, after some deep thought.

"I see. And the other button?"

"Oh, that's to tell you what time it is in another country."

Everyone suddenly seemed very interested.

"What other country?" said the captain sharply.

"It's stuck on Singapore," said Bigmac.

The captain laid it down very carefully. The sergeant wrote out a label and tied it to the watch strap. Then the captain picked up Bigmac's jacket.

"What is this made of?" he said.

"I du

The captain pulled it this way and that.

"How is it made?"

"Ali, I know that," said Bigmac. "I read about it. You mix some chemicals together, and you get plastic. Easy."

"In camouflage colours," said the captain.

Bigmac licked his lips. He was sure that he was in deep trouble, so there was no sense in pretending.

"That's just to make you look hard," he said.

"Hard. I see," said the captain, and his eyes didn't give away whether he really saw or not. He held up the back of the jacket and pointed to two words done rather badly in biro.

"What exactly are BLACKBURY SKINS?" he said.

"Er. That's me and Bazza and Skazz. Er. Skinheads. A ... kind of gang... "

"Clang," said the captain.

"Er. Yes."

"Skinheads?"

"Er ... the haircut," said Bigmac.

"Looks like an ordinary military haircut to me," said the sergeant.

"And these," said the captain, pointing to the swastikas en either side of the name. "Gang badges, are they? Also to make you look ... hard?"

"Er ... it's just ... you know ... Adolf Hitler and that," said Bigmac.

All the men were staring at him.

"It's just decoration," said Bigmac.

The captain put the coat down very slowly.

"It's nothing to get excited about," said Bigmac. "Where I come from, you can buy badges and things down the market, you can get Gestapo knives-"

"That's enough!" said the captain. "Now listen to me. You'll make it easier on yourself if you tell me the truth right now. I want your name, the names of your contacts ... everything. A unit is coming from headquarters and they aren't as patient as I am, do you understand?"

He stood up and started to put Bigmac's labelled belongings into a sack.

"Hey, that's my stuff-" mumbled Bigmac.

"Lock him up."

"You can't lock me up just for some old car-"

"We can for spying," said Captain Harris. "Oh, yes, we can."

He strode out of the room.

"Spying?" said Bigmac. "Me?"

"Are you one of them Hitler Youths?" said the sergeant, conversationally. "I saw you lot on the newsreel. Waving all them torches. Nasty pieces of work, I thought. Like Boy Scouts gone bad."

"I haven't spied for anyone!" shouted Bigmac. "I don't know how to spy! I don't even like Germany! My brother got sent home from Munich for stitching up one of their football supporters with a scaffolding pole even though it wasn't his fault!"

Such rock-solid evidence of anti-Germanic feeling did not seem to impress the sergeant.