So I turn and walk away. I picture the yard as a seabed, my body in fish mode. I wish I was a mackerel. Mackerel have excellent communication and move-as-one skills. They're the socialites of the deep. Unless you're from a different shoal and then they might eat you. If I was a mackerel I'd be looking for a kelp forest, so that's what I do. I go for safe ground, move into the shadows.?

'I'm Billy Shiel,' I say. 'People call me Fish Boy. My skin goes up and down like the waves. My mind goes in and out like the sea.'

I think of my collection of grey stuff I picked out before I started here. Grey pencil case, grey bag, grey folder. No labels, no designs, nothing stand-outable, nothing noticeable at all. Till I got the Nikes.

'Back to school tomorrow,' she says and my heart dive-bombs. She goes upstairs. I make my hand into a mechanical grabber. Up, out, over, release. Sometimes the cards go in the box, mostly they don't. I watch it filling up as if it's counting the time down to tomorrow, as if each card's a minute. I move slow cos I don't want the box to be full. I want to pull them all out again, so tomorrow never comes and I can stay here in the inbetween time, where it's safe, forever.

Zadie appears from nowhere, like a musk deer. They're expert hiders. They only let you see them when they want you to.

We go faster. Through a warm current like a blanket, a cold one that makes my goosebumps bump out. Kelp laps my stomach and flaps under my chin. The blue gets higher and wider, like the sea is opening up, like we're swimming into its mouth. I can't believe I'm seeing this stuff. That this is me.

Do what I do or it'll be you next. No one ever says that but everyone knows it.

I feel the storm stirring inside me. I see the wind sweeping over the Atlantic cranking itself up, sucking moisture and twisting , reaching a hundred miles an hour, a hundred and fifty, round and round, getting ready to go inland, to find its way out over the sea. I see Sir David open his mouth like he's about to speak. But he doesn't. My head buzzes. And then there's just nothing, just silence, like the screen's flicked off and David's face fades out into darkness.

We look out at the waves. I think of the underneath, the stillness, the spinning, the miles away from everythingness, the nothing. The Us.

Adolescence for an Arctic fox is nearly always a solitary journey. The only way of surviving is to split up and face the six-month-long winter along. Even so, a young fox has only a one in five chance of surviving.

I close my eyes and hear Mum and Dad arguing downstairs. I put my fingers in my ears and slide under the blanket like a snail into a shell.

In my mind I walk through the Sahara Desert, miles and miles of heat and sand and emptiness, I fly up round the jagged edges of Krakatoa. I watch it explode. Thirteen thousand times the power of an atomic bomb. I think of the lava flooding out, boiling over, melted rock bubbling out of the earth. I pull up and out and into space like a satellite. I watch the storm coming, a white swirl on the thermal map, I watch it head for the Florida coast. Closer, closer, closer. I think of the people in the houses, the flats. The stuck ones, with nowhere to go.

All I want is to be there. Spinning with them again. Away from everything.

Sharks are the only fish with eyelids.

My brain is black and long and full of tunnels. I slip down one, into warm fuzzy easiness.

'Magic's mainly about probabilities -- it's all ain the preparation,' he says, 'I knew you were gonna turn up, I just didn't know when,' He sits up. His sleeves droop over his hands. 'Pick a number between four and eight.'

'Not again.' I finger shoot myself in the head.

'I'm trying to show you something, okay.'

'Okay, okay!' I flop down on the beach. 'Five.' I don't even bother trying to work it out. Or working out how he will work it out.

He rolls up his sweatshirt. The water spurts on the sand. I knew you would pick five, it says.

'Surprise,' I say all slowly and play dead.

'Get up,' he says and pokes me in the leg. 'Look under the other sleeve.'

'Why?'

'Just do it.' I roll over and wring it up. I knew you would pick four, it says. This actually is a surprise. I try to hide my eyebrows. 'Trousers,' he says.

'Seriously?'

He just points at the trousers. I knew you would pick eight is on his left leg. I knew you would pick seven is on the right. It seems so simple, so totally obvious. I have no idea why I never even thought of it at all. 'Preparation,' he says.

The most touching and inspiring part of the book. A life under control is a life being prepared.

On the way home the sun breaks through and shines over everything. Poking in and out the houses. Filling all the empty spaces.

I go into class with my new reset-compass head on. Everything looks different. Like I've been pointing in the wrong direction the whole time. I think how we're all so scared of everything, of each other, scared of mucking up, scared of looking stupid, scared of being laughed at.

Sometimes hamsters need to curl up in a big pile of sawdust, and meerkats bolt back down their hole, conger eels pull their heads back in the rock crack and monkey beetles lie down in daisies and let the petals curl up over their heads and hold them out of the cold, all through the night, till morning.

Life is full of hard-its and soft-its.