Switchers by Kate Thompson Page B

either Tess or Kevin, therefore, when they found themselves stepping right into the path of an oncoming car. Nor was it particularly dangerous, because a goat thinks fast and acts faster. They sprang out of the way, feeling nothing more than a brief moment of excitement which made them jump and dance for a few yards along the verge, just for the joy of existence. The driver, however, got the fright of her life when the two shaggy goats appeared from nowhere, and she swerved much more violently than was necessary to avoid them. When she eventually calmed herself down and reversed out of the hedge, there was a hole in it that would have taken the two goats a week to eat.
    Lizzie was standing with Nancy in the scrub behind her house.
    ‘Hush, now, Nancy,’ she was saying. ‘Shhh. Don’t you worry about them two.’ She peered between the trees. ‘Where is they, anyway? They’s gone out of sight, Nancy. They’s disappeared.’
    As it happened, they had disappeared from Nancy’s mind at around the same moment, leaving an abrupt vacuum which she filled by lying down in calm detachment and chewing her cud.
    ‘There’s no sign of them at all, Nancy,’ said Lizzie. ‘I suppose they’s forgotten us.’ She was right.
    The next house the two goats met was surrounded by a stone wall with a wide coping stone running along the top. The wall was high enough to deter a stray cow or sheep, and more than high enough to contain the little terrier who yapped at them from the other side of the gates. He was one of those pampered little dogs that are somehow never to be found in farmyards or houses that have children, and he had never in his life encountered a boot or a rough hand. To protect him against the cold, he wore a red tartan jacket which made him feel a lot bigger and stronger than he ought to have done.
    Kevin hopped effortlessly up on to the top of the wall, and Tess joined him. The little dog began to yap hysterically, halfway between the garden wall and the safety of the house, halfway between rage and terror. Inside the house, his mistress turned up the volume on the TV to cover the noise he was making. He hadn’t been outside for long, and the fresh air was good for him.
    Kevin jumped down without warning and ran full tilt at the dog, who paused for an instant in astonishment, then ran yelping around the side of the house. When Kevin gave up the chase and returned to nibble the top off a young Japanese willow, the terrier took up a position on the corner of the house and stood there, watching, with his tail between his legs.
    The hours passed. Lizzie pottered around the house and garden and waited for her visitors to return. Around mid-afternoon she hacked a couple of parsnips out of the frozen ground of her garden, and collected carrots and a turnip from the potting shed where they were stored in boxes of sand.
    ‘They shouldn’t be hungry by the time they gets back,’ she said to Nancy, ‘but in my experience them teenagers always is, no matter how much you gives them.’
    She brought the vegetables into the kitchen and ran water into the sink. Outside the window the sky had clouded over, and as she stood there wondering if it was going to start snowing, she saw a policeman coming down the path.
    ‘Watch out, pussums,’ she said. ‘You’d better make yourselves scarce. Here comes trouble.’

CHAPTER TWELVE
    L IZZIE WENT OUT INTO the little hallway of her house and stood beside the hat-stand. The policeman knocked on the door. Lizzie sat perfectly still and waited. Moppet offered to sit on her knee, but Lizzie shook her head and held up a hand to stop her. The policeman knocked again. Lizzie reached out and rocked the hat-stand gently, so that it made mysterious creaking and rattling sounds. Then she waited again. After a while, the policeman knocked a third time and called out: ‘Hello?’
    Lizzie stood up and opened the kitchen door and closed it. Then she did it again.
    ‘Hello?’ called the policeman.