They lived in a flat above a chip shop, Colin and his mum, in a ragged, sprawling town on the edge of London. The town was always spilling over itself, growing new bits here and there like tumours or warts, edging nearer to the big city all the time. It wouldn't be long, everyone said, before London just swallowed them up, the way it swallowed everything.

Colin thought the worst thing about the town was how you could never really escape it. He'd tried it one weekend on his bike, a rucksack on his back with a packet of corned-beef sandwiches and two cans of 7-Up in it. He'd ridden for miles and miles, but all he'd found were the outskirts of the town, and after that the outskirts of the outskirts. Just when the outskirts looked like they were about to end and turn into proper fields and hedges and sky, they started up again and he realised these were the outskirts of London. He was going back in again. All the outskirts were inskirts. It was dark by that time, and Colin was going to be in a lot of trouble when he got home.

The pictures Colin drew when he was little were not like other children's pictures, of houses and people, with their stick arm and legs, their big curly grins. Colin's pictures were of outside things: hillsides and cliffs, rivers and trees. He drew birds instead of people, but they weren't the tiny squiggly 'm's that hovered over the heads of the other kids' stick-people. Colin's birds were real things, with solid bodies and legs and wings and eyes and feathers. The children in his class looked at them and said, "You don't do birds like that! Miss, Miss -- Colin doesn't know how to do birds!"

Colin took the pictures home and his mum stuck them up on the fridge. "I got a gold star and a tick," he told her. "For careful work."

When Colin was nine, he asked his mum if they could move to the country. She laughed and rolled her eyes. "Chance'd be a fine thing, love." she said. "Eat your nuggets."

Round their way it was all estates and estuary accents, blocks of flats and multi-storey car parks. There were gangs of kids who hung around outside the chip shop most nights, smoking and swearing and wearing hoods. Colin watched them sometimes from his bedroom window, and wondered what it would feel like to be tough like that. To be a hard kid. To walk around the world acting like you had a perfect right to be there. He wondered how people got that way, or whether they were just born like it.

Colin spent quite a lot of his time looking out of his bedroom window. Often, he ignored the street, with its mess of litter and people. It was better to look up into the sky. He'd cup his hands around his face, making a sort of tube to look through, so he could block out the bits of buildings and streetlights and telegraph poles. When he looked at the sky through his makeshift telescope, he could imagine he'd actually escaped, and that there was nothing outside his window but miles and miles of space.

The chip shop below their flat didn't belong to Colin and his mum, they just happened to live upstairs. Hot frying smells filtered upwards through the floorboards, and seemed to leave a coating of grease in their hair and on their skin. Yvonne worked in Sainsbury's, and sometimes she brought cream cakes home for tea. They'd only have been chucked away otherwise, as Yvonne pointed out, and she got them at a reduced price. "We'll get fat," she would sigh, neatly wiping up the last of the cream from the plate with her little finger. But they never did. Colin and his mum were both small, slender people, fine-boned and sharp-featured. They had the same sandy hair and skin, the same green eyes. They shared an odd, precise way of moving, almost like dancers. "Runs in the family," Yvonne said, smiling.

The kids at school thought Colin was weird. They called him 'Billy' after Billy Elliott, and sometimes they called him 'Poofy Colin', and sometimes they called him 'You Rat-Faced Tosser'.

Colin didn't have a dad. Most of the time, that was okay.

When Colin was eleven, Ben Cowell dared him to nick something out of the tobacconists on Moorgreen Street. The kids from Colin's school never went to that shop for their after-school crisps and chocolate, because Mrs Matthews was a witch. It was obvious that she was a witch -- she didn't even try to hide it. She had a funny eye that wasn't like the other one, and everyone said it was glass. There were reports that she smoked something weird in a novelty pipe shaped like a gnarled and knotted twig.

He decided to do the dare at lunchtime (they weren't really supposed to leave the school during breaks, but the teachers had long ago given up trying to enforce the rule). He only went because he was more scared of Ben Cowell than he was of Mrs Matthews. She might be a witch, but he'd never heard of Mrs Matthews beating anyone up, or giving them a Chinese burn.

Moorgreen Street was really more of an alley than a street, out of the way of the main shopping areas, narrow, old and dark. Businesses opened up there now and again, hung around for a while, and then shut themselves up quite suddenly, like clams. But nothing ever happened to Mrs Matthews' tobacconists. It endured, its dusty window one of few in the street that wasn't boarded up or whitewashed over, encrusted with tatty fly-posters and graffiti.

Colin pushed the door open, praying it wouldn't have one of those jangling things that make a noise when someone enters. But everything was quiet. Walking into the shop, he thought, was like stepping down into some underwater cave. Everything inside it seemed to be the brownish colour of river-water, and the air was cool and slightly damp. Above it all hung the overpowering smell of mingled tobaccos. Colin blinked in the gloom, feeling sick and jittery with nerves. Fluorescent afterimages of the bright street outside floated in front of his eyes. Around him, he saw... well, he saw all the things you might expect to see in a corner shop: copies of the Times and the Mirror, Walkers Crisps, Twixes and Milky Ways, Swan Vestas and Silk Cut. He also saw a few that you might not. A plastic spider, for instance, dangling on a string of elastic. A tall glass jar full of coloured marbles. A collection of tiny animal skulls, displayed on a shelf.

The shop seemed to be empty; there was no sign of Mrs Matthews. Colin held his breath and didn't move, but still nothing happened, and nobody came. He relaxed a bit -- perhaps this would be much easier than he'd thought. Perhaps, for once, things were actually going his way. He looked around for something small and easily swipe-able. He'd just stuff something in his pocket and then get out. Newspapers were too bulky. Crisps packets would crackle noisily. A handful of penny sweets might do. Boring, though. He'd got this far, hadn't he? Suddenly, he felt a shameful desire to impress Ben and the others. He could do better than sugar shrimps and white chocolate buttons, couldn't he? He needed something like... like that shiny silver cigarette lighter. Right there at the top of the display stand on the counter. It had a cool picture of a skull on it, done in white on black enamel. As soon as he saw it, Colin knew he needed that cigarette lighter. People would leave him alone if he had something like that. Maybe they'd even... admire him. People like Ben, and Gavin, and Dean. They'd have to, wouldn't they? Perhaps stealing the lighter would make him into a completely different person! Someone less odd and awkward. Someone who walked through the ordinary world as though it was where he belonged.

Carefully, he crept over to the counter. Short as he was, he had to stretch up a bit to reach the top of the stand, but he got it. He pushed the lighter off the display stand with the tips of his fingers, and then it was in his hand, cool and weighty, gleaming in the dim light that filtered in through the dusty window. Smiling, he gripped it tightly in his fist, and turned to leave. That was when he saw Mrs Matthews.

She was a big woman -- not really fat, just big -- and she was standing in the doorway, blocking the way out. Colin thought that he'd never seen an old lady that big before. Her hair stood out in a fluffy white cloud around her head, and she was dressed in baggy grey trousers and a flowery overall. Colin thought of an elephant in a dress, which should have been funny, but somehow wasn't. Instead it seemed frightening and sinister. It was things in disguise. It was people not being at all what they seemed. Mrs Matthews looked at Colin with those mismatched eyes of hers, and said nothing. Then she slowly withdrew the pipe from her mouth and sent a cloud of blue smoke out into the room.

"Sorry," Colin said quickly. His voice sounded squeaky inside his head.

Mrs Matthews said nothing. She just held out her hand, palm up, and waited. Colin forced himself to walk over to her. As he put the lighter in her hand, he accidentally brushed it with his own. It felt like an ordinary hand. Still, it made him shudder, as though he'd touched a spider or a snake.

Mrs Matthews opened the door. Colin thought: Dear God, Ben Cowell can give me ten Chinese burns if you make her let me out of here. He can get me after school, I don't even care. But Mrs Matthews didn't let him out. She just banged the bowl of her pipe against the door-frame, knocking out all the ash and dottle onto the pavement. Then she closed the door again, and locked it. Colin rather wished he'd gone to the toilet before he began his career in crime. He thought he might like to be sick, as well.

Mrs Matthews was coming for him. She moved with a strange, lumbering, lurching gate. She lumbered towards him, then she lurched past him. Then she stopped and turned, beckoned to him with her finger, and disappeared through a dark doorway at the back of the shop. Colin hesitated, and then followed. He didn't really seem to have much of a choice.

He wasn't sure what he'd expected to find on the other side of that doorway. A maze of dark, winding corridors, perhaps. A den. A lair. A web. But it was just a room. An poky, old-ladyish room, with a gas fire and a tatty three-piece suite. A crocheted blanket hung over the back of the sofa. There was a big old telly in the corner, balanced on a spindly-legged table, and there were brass plates displayed on the wall, pictures of sailing ships and flowers embossed onto them. On the mantelpiece over the gas fire, there was a collection of china ornaments and a ticking clock. The lighter had been there too, next to the clock. Colin frowned at it.

He didn't notice the other things straight away. Things like the rows of jars with yellowing labels. Like the dried seaweed nailed to the wall, or the little knitted dolls without heads. When he did notice these things, he decided to pretend he hadn't.

There was a bustling, clinking noise coming from behind a doorway covered with a beaded curtain. Mrs Matthews, he thought. He fidgeted, wondering what she was doing in there.

"Sit down." The voice came, loud and deep and sudden, from behind the curtain. A posh-sounding voice, he thought, for someone who worked in a shop. It was, unquestionably, an order. Colin obeyed. When Mrs Matthews emerged, she was carrying two cups. Colin looked at them. You weren't supposed to take food or drink from strangers, were you? But then, you weren't supposed to steal cigarette lighters from them, either. He took the drink she handed to him. It had bits floating in it.

Mrs Matthews sat down in the easy chair, and cleared her throat. She took a sip from her cup, sighed, and put it down on the coffee table.

"I am going to tell you a story," she said.

"Um," said Colin. "Okay."

"Once upon a time," began Mrs Matthews in her deep, posh voice, "there was a large and prosperous village. It stood a little way from the sea, and after a time, it stood a little closer to the sea, and when many years had passed, it stood closer still, until it found itself standing right on the edge of the crumbling sandstone cliff. And slowly, over and over again, the houses and cottages nearest the ragged edge were abandoned. Occasionally, one would slip down the cliff and fall -- splash! -- into the water."

Mrs Matthews looked at Colin severely.

"I don't know," she said, "whether you've ever found yourself in a constant state of retreat from the inevitable?"

"Erm..." said Colin.

next: It is not an easy position to be in. One tends to find one's priorities changing, sometimes in the most peculiar way...