I inspected the posters on the cafe walls to see if there was anything interesting happening in the area in the near future, but apart from the Film Club there wasn't much. The next showing was The Tin Drum, but that was a book my father had bought for me years ago, one of the few real presents he has ever given me, and I had therefore assiduously avoided reading it, just as I had Myra Breckinridge, another of his rare gifts. Mostly my father just gives me the money that I ask for and lets me get what I want for myself. I don't think he's really interested; but, on the other hand, he wouldn't refuse me anything. As far as I can tell, we have some sort of unspoken agreement that I keep quiet about not officially existing in return for being able to do more or less as I like on the island and buy more or less what I like in the town. The only thing we had argued about recently was the motorbike, which he said he would buy me when I was a bit older. I suggested that it might be a good idea to get it in midsummer so that I could get plenty of practice in before the skiddy weather set in, but he thought there might be too much tourist traffic going through the town and on the roads around it in the middle of the summer. I think he just wants to keep putting it off; he might be frightened of me gaining too much independence, or he might simply be scared that I'll kill myself the way a lot of youths seem to when they get a bike. I don't know; I never know exactly how much he really feels for me. Come to think of it, I never know exactly how much I really feel for him.

I had rather been hoping that I might see somebody I knew while I was in the town, but the only people I saw were old Mackenzie in the gun and tackle shop and Mrs Stuart in the cafe, yawning and fat behind her Formica counters and reading a Mills & Boon. Not that I know all that many people anyway, I suppose; Jamie is my only real friend, though through him I have met a few people of about my own age I regard as acquaintances. Not going to school, and having to pretend I didn't live on the island all the time, has meant that I didn't grow up with anybody of my own age (except Eric, of course, but even he was away for a long time), and about the time I was thinking of venturing further afield and getting to know more people Eric went crazy, and things got a bit uncomfortable in the town for a while.

Mothers told their children to behave or Eric Cauldhame would get them and do horrible things to them with worms and maggots. As I suppose was inevitable, the story gradually became that Eric would set fire to them, not just their pet dogs; and, as was probably also inevitable, a lot of kids started to think that I was Eric, or that I got up to the same tricks. Or perhaps their parents guessed about Blyth, Paul and Esmerelda. Whatever, they would run from me, or shout rude things from a distance, so I kept a low profile and restricted my brief visits to the town to a taciturn minimum. I get the odd funny look to this day, from children, youths and adults, and I know some mothers tell their children to behave or 'Frank'll get you, but it doesn't bother me. I can take it.

I got on my bike and went back to the house a bit recklessly, shooting through puddles on the path and taking the Jump — a bit on the path where there's a long downhill on a dune and then a short uphill where it's easy to leave the ground — at a good forty kilometres per hour, landing with a muddy thump that nearly had me in the whin bushes and left me with a very sore bum, making me want to keep opening my mouth with the feeling of it. But I got back safely. I told my father I was all right and I'd be in for my dinner in an hour or so, then went back to the shed to wipe Gravel down. After I'd done that I made up some new bombs to replace the ones I'd used the day before, and a few extra besides. I put the old electric fire on in the shed, not so much to warm me as to keep the highly hygroscopic mixture from absorbing moisture out of a damp air.

What I'd really like, of course, is not to have to bother with lugging kilo bags of sugar and tins of weed killer back from the town to stuff into electrical-conduit piping which Jamie the dwarf gets for me from the building contractor's where he works in Porteneil. With a cellar full of enough cordite to wipe half the island off the map it does seem a bit daft, but my father won't let me near the stuff.

It was his father, Colin Cauldhame, who got the cordite from the ship-breaking yard there used to be down the coast. One of his relations worked there, and had found some old warship with one magazine still loaded with the explosive. Colin bought the cordite and used it to light fires with.

Uncontained, cordite makes a very good firelighter. Colin bought enough to last the house about two hundred years, even if his son had continued using it, so perhaps he was thinking of selling it. I know that my father did use it for a while, lighting the stove with it, but he hasn't for a while. God knows how much there still is down there; I've seen great stacks and bales of it still with the Royal Navy markings on it, and I've dreamed up any number of ways of getting at it, but short of tunnelling in from the shed and taking the cordite out from the back, so that the bales looked untouched from the inside of the cellar, I don't see how I could do it. My father checks the cellar every few weeks, going nervously down with a torch, counting the bales and sniffing, and looking at the thermometer and hygrometer.

It's nice and cool inside the cellar, and not damp, though I guess it can only be just above the water table, and my father seems to know what he's doing and is confident that the explosive hasn't become unstable, but I think he's nervous about it and has been ever since the Bomb Circle. (Guilty again; that was my fault, too. My second murder, the one when I think some of the family started to suspect.) If he's that frightened, though, I don't know why he doesn't just throw it out. But I think he's got his own little superstition about the cordite. Something about a link with the past, or an evil demon we have lurking, a symbol for all our family misdeeds; waiting, perhaps, one day, to surprise us.

Anyway, I have no access to it, and have to cart metres of black metal piping back from the town and sweat and labour over it, bending it and cutting it and boring it and crimping it and bending it again, straining with it in the vice until the bench and shed creak with my efforts. I suppose it's a craft in some ways, and certainly it is quite skilled, but I get bored with it sometimes, and only thinking of the use I'll put those little black torpedoes to keeps me heaving and bending away.

I tidied everything away and cleaned the shed up after my bomb-making activity, then went in for dinner.

"They're searching for him," my father said suddenly, in between mouthfuls of cabbage and soya chunks. His dark eyes flickered at me like a long sooty flame, then he looked down again. I drank some of the beer I had opened. The new batch of home-brew tasted better than the last lot, and stronger.

"Eric?"

"Yes, Eric. They're looking for him on the moors."

"On the moors?"

"They think he might be on the moors."

"Yes, that would account for them looking for him there."

"Indeed," my father nodded. "Why are you humming?"

I cleared my throat and kept on eating my burgers, pretending I hadn't heard him properly.

"I was thinking," he said, then spooned some more of the green-brown mixture into his face and chewed for a long time. I waited to hear what he was going to say next. He waved his spoon slackly, pointing it vaguely upstairs, then said: "How long would you say the flex on the telephone is?"

"Loose or stretched?" I said quickly, putting down my glass of beer. He grunted and said nothing else, going back to his plate of food, apparently satisfied if not pleased. I drank.