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whispered. And she took my hands in hers and hers were that tender and so strong. And she said, ‘With these hands, you must be about the Lord’s work, Stephen Rose.’ And I felt the power growing in them. ‘Remember that thou art dust and dirt,’ she said, ‘and remember that thou art also holy.’ And she pulled me up till I stood on the sand and the sea started to move again and the folk and the dogs started to stir again. ‘I will watch thee, Stephen Rose,’ she whispered, ‘even unto the end of thy days. Remember to use thy talents well.’ And she was gone.”
    I looked at Geordie. Geordie looked at me.
    “Did anybody else see her?” Geordie whispered.
    “I was the only privileged one,” said Stephen. “The sunbathers went on frying, the kids went on screaming, the dogs went on yapping, but for me, in an instant, everything had changed.”
    “Bliddy Hell,” I said.
    “Aye,” said Stephen. “And she’s been back a couple of times since.”
    “Bliddy Hell,” said Geordie.
    “Do you believe me?” said Stephen.
    “Dunno,” I said.
    “Dunno,” he echoed. He leaned close to me, looked into me. “Some people find it hard to believe anything, Davie. They want proof. What if the angel came to you, Davie? Would you believe me then? Or would you still just say ‘Dunno’? And what if you saw the power of the Lord himself at work here in Felling?”
    He inspected the finished apostle.
    “No need to be scared,” he said. “Not yet.”
    He held the apostle up in front of my eyes, and its face looked into my face. He smiled.
    “But one day,” he said, “I’ll mebbe show you something that’ll scare you stiff. It’ll scatter all your doubts. There’ll be no more maybes or dunnos.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You’ll be bliddy petrified, Davie. Your soul’ll bliddy crack.”
    He smiled. He winked at Geordie.
    “Just joking,” he said, and he finished his tale. “Soon after I was struck down and raised up again, a priest came to the school looking for vocations. I stood up. ‘Me,’ I said. ‘I’ll be a priest.’ And pretty soon, off I went to Bennett.”
    He laid the apostle at the center of the fire. He heaped embers up around it. He placed more sticks to quicken the fire. I watched them burn.
    Then we flinched and were dead still. There were footsteps above us, in Braddock’s garden.
    Two silhouettes of boys appeared at the quarry’s edge.
    “Skinner,” I whispered.
    “Aye,” said Geordie. “And looks like Poke as well.”
    “But not Mouldy, thank God.”
    “These are your enemies?” said Stephen.
    “Aye,” said Geordie.
    We watched the boys crouch above us. They peered down. We heard them whispering. They moved around the quarry’s rim. We heard them coming down towards the quarry’s entrance. I hunched with Geordie in the shadows under the rock as they crept closer.
    “See?” he whispered. “If we had trip wires they’d be straight in the bliddy pond.”
    “Get ready to jump and yell,” I said. “We’ll scare the living daylights out of them.”
    We tried to hold our giggles in. We waited, but Stephen was the first to move. He slipped out of the cave and ran fast and low. There was a commotion under the hawthorn trees; then the Pelaw lads started squealing. We heard them crashing away. Then Skinner’s voice, weeping with fright.
    “He stabbed me! He bliddy stabbed me!”
    Then Poke, yelling down from the quarry’s rim:
    “Wait till we tell Mouldy!”

twelve
    Stephen came back, wiping his knife blade on a handful of grass. We were trembling. We were speechless. We started backing away.
    “What’s
wrong
?” said Stephen. “It’s just a scratch. A little warning.”
    He grinned at us.
    “I thought you hated them. And who’s this Mouldy?”
    We just looked at him.
    “Who’s
Mouldy
?” he repeated.
    He shrugged.
    “Don’t tell me, then,” he said.
    He knelt in front of the fire. He spat and the spit hissed. Geordie cursed under his breath,