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typewriter, but knew it was too traceable, so blew it a kiss, and went out after him. ‘Hang on,’ I said, pulling the door to, ‘we’re in no hurry.’
    â€˜Not much we aren’t,’ he says over his shoulder.
    â€˜We’ve got months to splash the lolly,’ I whispered as we crossed the yard, ‘only don’t let that gate creak too much or you’ll have the narks tuning-in.’
    â€˜You think I’m barmy?’ he said, creaking the gate so that the whole street heard.
    I don’t know about Mike, but now I started to think, of how we’d get back safe through the streets with that money-box up my jumper. Because he’d clapped it into my hand as soon as we’d got to the main road, which might have meant that he’d started thinking as well, which only goes to show how you don’t know what’s in anybody else’s mind unless you think about things yourself. But as far as my thinking went at that moment it wasn’t up to much, only a bit of fright that wouldn’t budge not even with a hot blow-lamp, about what we’d say if a copper asked us where we were off to with that hump in my guts.
    â€˜What is it?’ he’d ask, and I’d say: ‘A growth.’ ‘What do you mean, a growth, my lad?’ he’d say back, narky like. I’d cough and clutch myself like I was in the most tripe-twisting pain in the world, and screw my eyes up like I was on my way to the hospital, and Mike would take my arm like he was the best pal I’d got. ‘Cancer,’ I’d manage to say to Narker, which would make his slow punch-drunk brain suspect a thing or two. ‘A lad of your age?’ So I’d groan again, and hope to make him feel a real bully of a bastard, which would be impossible, but anyway: ‘It’s in the family, Dad died of it last month, and I’ll die of it next month by the feel of it.’ ‘What, did he have it in the guts?’ ‘No, in the throat. But it’s got me in the stomach.’ Groan and cough. ‘Well, you shouldn’t be out like this if you’ve got cancer, you should be in the hospital.’ I’d get ratty now: ‘That’s where I’m trying to go if only you’d let me and stop asking so many questions. Aren’t I, Mike?’ Grunt from Mike as he unslung his cosh. Then just in time the copper would tell us to get on our way, kind and considerate all of a sudden, saying that the outpatient department of the hospital closes at twelve, so hadn’t he better call a taxi? He would if we liked, he says, and he’d pay for it as well. But we tell him not to bother, that he’s a good bloke even if he is a copper, that we know a short cut anyway. Then just as we’re turning a corner he gets it into his big batchy head that we’re going the opposite way to the hospital, and calls us back. So we’d start to run … if you can call all that thinking.
    Up in my room Mike rips open the money-box with a hammer and chisel, and before we know where we are we’ve got seventy-eight pounds fifteen and fourpence ha’penny each lying all over my bed like tea spread out on Christmas Day: cake and trifle, salad and sandwiches, jam tarts and bars of chocolate: all shared alike between Mike and me because we believed in equal work and equal pay, just like the comrades my dad was in until he couldn’t do a stroke anymore and had no breath left to argue with. I thought how good it was that blokes like that poor baker didn’t stash all his cash in one of the big marble-fronted banks that take up every corner of the town, how lucky for us that he didn’t trust them no matter how many millions of tons of concrete or how many iron bars and boxes they were made of, or how many coppers kept their blue pop-eyed peepers glued on to them, how smashing it was that he believed in money-boxes when so many shopkeepers thought it