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More. More. More. It’s done. Go back, then. Back through the stinking filthy... urrrggghhh... urrrghhh.

Baz fell against the ladder, still sobbing, and began to pull himself out of the foul slurry. 
I did it, Dad. I did it. I did it...

“Oi! Where d’you think you’re going? Who said you could come out? We’re not done with you yet!” Steiner was shouting at him. Baz gazed up at the blurred and broken circle of light. He heard murmurs – the capos in some kind of discussion. Someone said the word ‘lid’, and Baz was terrified that he was about to be left down here in the darkness after all. 
No... not that. Please don’t
.

“... better idea.” Steiner’s voice again, drifting down in deep rebounding echoes. One shape had returned and now remained motionless, almost blocking out the light. Baz waited.

Something splattered onto his arm, then his face. A stream of liquid, bright drops raining down on him. It took Baz another second to realize what it was, and he tried to duck out of the way, lowering his head, scrunching up his shoulders. But there was nowhere to go, and so he simply clung to the ladder and waited for it to stop.

And eventually it did stop. The last few drops splashed down onto his knuckles.

“Ahh. That’s better! 
Now
 you can come up.”

He could come up, and for the moment nothing else mattered. The shame, the tears, none of it mattered. He wasn’t going to be shut down here in the reeking darkness. Baz climbed the ladder as fast as his aching body would allow, hauling himself upwards rung over rung, desperate to escape. He reached the top, threw himself forward and scrambled over the lip of the drain. On all fours he remained, crawling away from the hole, ready to tear his fingernails into the tarmac if anyone should try and drag him back.

“Ha, ha! Look at that! Like a bloody dog. Get up, you pillock!”

The capos’ voices sounded flat after the booming echoes of the drain. Baz stumbled to his feet, turned round, backed away a few paces. He saw that Ray was still on the ground, close to the manhole.

Hutchinson said, “D’you wanna leave this other one, then? ’Cos I got better things to do.”

Steiner looked down at Ray. “Yeah, OK. It’s getting late and I need ’nother drink. He’s gonna be in the hole for a lot longer anyway – a helluva lot longer. It can wait till next Sunday. Gives him a week to think about it. Gerrup, you mongrel!” Steiner kicked out at Ray.

Ray rolled sideways, got to his hands and knees, then stood up. He moved towards Baz uncertainly, still keeping his eye on the capos.

“Right. Sod off, the pair of you. Go on – crawl back to where you come from!”

They were apparently free to leave. Stunned, directionless, Baz had no thought of where he was going other than away from this spot. His legs were moving, but his eyes were focused on nothing.

Then Gene was there, standing in front of him. “You all right?”

The concern on Gene’s face brought Baz back into the present. He looked down at his clothes – T-shirt, shorts, trainers – all running wet and covered in filth. His bare arms and legs were streaked and glistening... urine trickled through his hair and down his neck.

Awareness of his foul and stinking self brought him to tears again, so that he was unable to speak. He couldn’t even wipe his eyes, his hands and arms were so disgusting.

“I can’t... I’m...”

“Don’t try and talk,” said Gene. “Let’s just get you cleaned up. We’ll see if the slob room’s open, yeah? Sneak you in there and you can have a shower. You’ll feel better then. Come and keep a lookout, Ray.”

Baz stumbled along between the two of them, the world around him a blur of utter misery.

Later he did feel a little better, but still not completely clean. The awful smell seemed to hang in his nostrils and at the back of his throat.

His shame was eased by the fact that others had suffered in the same way. As they sat around the slob room, the boys recounted their own tales of how they’d been put in the hole. Only Gene and Dyson, those who had been on the island the longest, had escaped the ritual.

“It could’ve been worse, mate,” said Amit. “At least you didn’t get the lid treatment like Jubo here. Or Taps. God, he came out screaming, Taps did. Remember that?” Amit lowered his voice as he glanced across to where Taps was sitting on his mattress. “I mean, it was like... I dunno, a breakdown or something. Poor guy wet his bed for a week after that.”

“You can still smell his mattress,” said Robbie. “Come on. We’d better get some sleep.”

It was late in the evening, and the windows of the slob room had grown dark, but nobody had come to switch out the light.

“The capos’ll be flat out by now,” said Gene. “Not likely to see them on a Sunday night. You feeling all right, Ray?”

Ray had been silent for hours, pale and withdrawn. He’d been sympathetic to Baz – helped him out with the offer of a clean T-shirt – but it was clear that his mind was elsewhere. Now he sat on the floor, his legs tucked beneath him, head lowered.

Without looking up, he said, “I can’t do it. I’m not going down there.”

It was a flat statement, and Baz knew that Ray wasn’t hoping for words of reassurance, or persuasion, or argument. He’d made up his mind. And maybe everyone else could see that, because nothing was said for a while.

“Well...” Gene eventually gave a short sigh. “You’ve only got one other choice, Ray. Refuse to work, and get yourself shipped back.”

“Can’t do that, either.”

“I’m telling you, mate, there’s no other way.”

“Course there’s another way. There’s always another bloody way.” Ray began to get to his feet. “What if I killed them both while they were asleep? That’d be another way, wouldn’t it? What if I stuck a bomb under their pillows?”

“Oh yeah, right.” Gene’s mouth went a bit crooked. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

“What if I poisoned them or... or filled the drain with concrete... or glued their stupid eyelids together so they couldn’t even see me? That’d be another way, wouldn’t it?”

One or two of the boys were openly laughing now, but Ray was obviously furious. He stormed off towards the washroom and disappeared.

“Nutter,” said Dyson. “You put up, or you shut up – that’s what you do.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve never had to go down there,” said Amit. “And it’s right, though, what he says. There does have to be another way. What d’you reckon, Gene?”

“Hey, don’t ask me,” Gene muttered. He stared towards the washroom, chin in his hands, a slight frown on his face.

Baz looked over at Taps. He was playing with a bit of plastic, some scrap of a thing that he’d found in the rubble. Poor kid. Taps wasn’t exactly shunned, not like Cookie, but he was outside the circle, somehow. A circle that Baz was beginning to feel part of, perhaps the more so after today’s experience.

Ray came back into view, pushing aside the washroom curtain. He flopped straight onto his mattress and lay gazing up at the ceiling. Baz decided he’d better go down there and try and talk to him.

He glanced at Taps in passing. Taps sat alone on his bed, fiddling with whatever it was that he’d found – a red and grey plastic thing that rested on his knee. He kept pressing buttons and making half-whispered sounds to himself. “
Peeow-peeow! Zz-zz-zz-yow!”

Baz felt a sudden warmth towards him – a child with no friends playing all by himself. “Hey, what you got there, Taps?”

“A present. Gameboy. 
Peeowww!”

“Wow. Haven’t seen one of those in ages.” Baz drew closer and peered at the Gameboy screen. It was blank. The thing had no batteries in it. Or maybe it was broken altogether. Either way Taps was playing some game that existed only in his own head.

“
Peeeeowwwww. Zt-zt-zt
.”

Baz left him to it.

CHAPTER
 
NINE

On Monday Baz and Ray got lucky. Taps had chosen them both for the sort-room crew.

“At least it’ll give our blisters a bit more chance to heal up,” Baz muttered afterwards.

“Yeah.”

They had a fairly easy day of it. Hutchinson was so hung over from his Sunday drinking session that he disappeared at the first opportunity, and as there was no new salvage to put through the tubs, Baz and Ray were at least able to keep their hands dry. They spent most of their time standing at the workbench next to Gene, learning codes.

Taps and Dyson sat outside, cleaning and polishing a few odd bits and pieces. There really wasn’t much to do. Dyson appeared to be giving Taps a hard time over how the teams should have been picked. Baz overheard him say, “Can’t you get it into your head? From now on it’s me, you, Jubo and Enoch. Yeah? We gotta stick together over this.”

It was the food thing again, Baz realized. Dyson was trying to keep his supporters close.

“You gonna make us another rocket, Gene?” Baz wandered over to Gene’s workbench.

“Nah. I need to try and get this Seagull working.” Gene was fiddling around with engine parts.

“What’s a Seagull?”

“Outboard motor. For a boat. A few weeks ago the divers dredged up some old tub from out where the reservoir used to be. Sailing dinghy. The mast’s kicking around out the back there. They’re not gonna sail it, though. They want a motor on it instead. They’re gonna get it patched up a bit, see if it still floats, and in the meantime I’m supposed to be trying to get this old thing going. It’s pretty basic, but it’s also pretty knackered.”

“What – so the engine fits onto the boat?”

“Yeah, you can fit a Seagull to anything. It just clamps onto the transom at the back, then you got yourself a motor boat.”

“How’d you 
learn
 all this stuff?”

“You mean mechanics?” Gene shrugged. “My dad started me off, I suppose. He was always fiddling around with motorbikes and scooters, and I got interested. He taught me a lot. And these old two-stroke engines aren’t that complicated. Seen one, you’ve seen ’em all.”

“Reckon you could make a bomb?” said Ray.

“A 
what?”

“A bomb. Baz told me you made some kind of rocket thing on Saturday, out of cigarette-lighter bits. I just wondered if you could make a proper bomb.” Ray’s big brown eyes were full of innocence, as if he were asking whether Gene knew how to repair a bicycle puncture.

“What are you, nuts? No, I don’t know how to make a ‘proper bomb’. You’d need all kinds of stuff – explosives, detonators... God knows what else. Why? Thinking of blowing the place up, are you?”

Ray didn’t reply immediately, and Gene said, “Oh, look out. The kid’s gone crazy. First he wants to put a bomb under the capos’ pillows, and now he wants to go the whole hog and blow up Preacher John. Yeah, I get it. This isn’t just about the hole, is it, Ray? You’ve been listening to Amit, haven’t you? Well, listen to me instead – it’s never gonna happen, OK? I can see where Amit’s coming from, and how things could be different – and better. But the Eck brothers, you really don’t want to think about messing with them. They’re grown men, for Chrissake. Big guys. With real guns, yeah? You’re not just gonna wipe them out like it’s some friggin’ video game.”

“But let’s say you 
could
 make a bomb. Just say you 
could...
 
.” Ray obviously had some idea buzzing around in his head.

“Hey – give up, willya?” Gene was having none of it. “I got work to do.” He took a heavy file from his toolbox and began rasping away with it, attacking a rusty piece of angle bracket that was held in the vice.

Ray looked as though he were about to say something else, but Baz shook his head at him. Enough. Leave it.

“Where did those divers come from, anyway?” he said, changing the subject. “And the boat? We’re miles away from where the sea used to be.”

Gene took a while to reply, cautious now as he spoke. “The Eck brothers ran a scuba diving club on Clough Reservoir,” he said. “But they used to hire the swimming pool at the sports center to practice sometimes, when the school was closed for the holidays. So they were up here with all their gear when it happened. That’s what I heard. Dunno what Preacher John was doing here. Moko worked at the school, though.”

“What – he was a 
teacher?”

“Nah. Caretaker, I think. And he had this old boat he was doing up at weekends and in the holidays. It was on dry land at the time. I think he was allowed to keep it at the school. Or maybe he lived here. Dunno. So Moko and the divers all got together, I suppose. He had the boat, they had the scuba gear.”

“Oh.”

“So... this rocket thing you made—’ Ray started again, but he got no further.

“Look.” Gene put down the file he was holding. “I’m not interested, OK? This is a cushy number for me, and I’m not gonna blow it. I’m definitely not teaming up with some idiot kids who’re gonna get me shot, yeah? ’Cos that’s what’ll happen to Amit, and that’s what’ll happen to you if you carry on the way you’re going.” He lowered his voice. “OK, anyone can see that things’d be a dam’ sight easier round here with no divers and no capos. Yeah, and if I thought we had any chance of making it happen, then I might go for it. But there’s no chance. And you’ve got no idea what you’re dealing with. Now get back to your codes and gimme a break.”

The jetty gang were covered in grey powdery dust when they returned that evening.

“We bin mixin’ concrete,” said Robbie. “God, it was a killer.”

“
Concrete?” said
Dyson. “Didn’t know we had any. Where’d it come from?”

“The storeroom. Luke went in there and came out with all these bags of cement on a trolley. Never seen that before. Then we had to bring a load of sand and chippings down from the building site. Mix it into concrete on the jetty.”

“What for?” Dyson took a spoonful of spaghetti from his tin. The boys spread themselves around the seating area of the slob room, some draped across the chairs, some lying on the floor.

“Well, we’ve been building, like, some kind of platform,” said Robbie. “Or a concrete base. You tell ’em, Amit.”

“Yeah, it’s right at the end of the jetty,” said Amit. “Steiner made us put four planks in a square, stood up on their edges like we were making a sandpit or something. Yeah? Then we had to hammer in bits of wood at the corners and along the sides so the planks didn’t fall over. And then we had to mix all this concrete and spread it around in there.”