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of the queen set into it on a transparent plastic disc; Satish could see the dots that made up each picture. He scratched at the surface with his fingernail.
    ‘Careful!’
    ‘I am being careful. I just want to see how hard it is. Will it wear down like the rest of the soap?’
    ‘I don’t know. That’s not the point. Do you like them?’
    ‘They’re OK. They’re just soaps.’ He leaned down and sniffed. ‘They don’t smell of much.’
    Satish had bought his mum Aqua Manda bath foam for her birthday; he knew the importance of powerful fragrancing where women’s toiletries were concerned. But now, looking at Mandy, he had the sense that he hadn’t given her the right answers.
    ‘They’re really nice, though. Special, like you said. I haven’t seen any like these before.’
    Mandy smiled at him, placated. They were in Satish’s room, its familiar landscape glamorised by the flickering, dappled shadows of the bunting. Since early morning Satish’s dad and Mr Brecon had been on ladders, stringing triangular pennants across the street under the eaves of the houses. Every few yards there was also a line of Union Jacks with the queen pictured in the middle of them, wearing her cloak and crown.
    There were no cars parked in the street; it was empty and waiting, a sweep of uncluttered tarmac between two rows of identical semis: the same wavy roof tiles, the same dormers, the same patches of green at the front, the same brick pillars marking the entrance to the same concrete driveways. At either end, Cherry Gardens was anchored by homes of eclectic design: corner houses, owing allegiance neither to Satish’s road, nor to the streets adjoining them. Aside from these mavericks, there were only subtle variations: the colour of a door, a rockery instead of a flowerbed out front, a ceramic house number in place of a metal one.
    The men were nearly finished. The ladders stood at the entrance to Cherry Gardens, where you could turn in from the village’s main road. Resting his elbows on the windowsill, Satish peered down to where the men were working, flattening his cheek against the glass. They were putting up a banner, their finishing touch, and he read it backwards: ‘Reign She May Long’.
    Looking up, it was hard to see past the lines of red, white and blue; they cut off the sky. When the wind lifted, as it did now, the bunting swayed and bounced like the roof of a tent.
    He heard Mandy come and stand beside him. Her elbow was on the sill, touching his. He wanted to move away and he wanted to stay there. Satish kept looking forwards; her house was opposite his. She had the dormer room, too. He concentrated on his arm, not letting it push any nearer, not letting it pull away. He thought about food.
    In her kitchen, he knew, Mandy’s mum was decorating fairy cakes in red, white and blue. He visualised glass bowls of bright colour on the marbled Formica of their counter, vibrant dribbles of sweetness that hardened as they trickled down the sides of the cakes. Satish was a connoisseur of Mandy’s mum’s fairy cakes; he liked the icing best when it had just lost its gloss and a thin matte crust had formed over the stickiness underneath. This held true for only a very short moment but if you pushed against it with your tongue, you could taste the sweetness and feel the give of it without breaking through.
    Beside him, Mandy was standing quietly, looking out over the road. He thought he should say something funny, or clever, but wasn’t sure which words he could enlist to do that. Her elbow was a constant pressure against his. If either of them moved, something would be switched off. He thought of electricity experiments at school: light bulbs and circuits. He remembered the muffled snarl of the buzzers.
    Mandy was his secret. When they all played together, him and Cai, her and Sarah, she was like most of the other girls he saw at school: she went on about pop stars and laughed about things that didn’t make sense to