It’s so unfair. The worst thing ever just happened, all cause my mum made me take down the Christmas tree. I asked why Julia couldn’t do it for once. ‘Your sister’s got the artistic eye, so she decorates the tree. You undecorate it. I’ve got to polish the units, and your father’s in Oxford, so that leaves you. Won’t you just do what you’re told without whining for once?’ When adults ask you a question you have to answer ‘Yes, miss’ or ‘No, sir’ but when you ask them something, they can just order you about and slap another question back.

So anyway, I’d wrapped up the baubles in tissue paper and was coiling up the lights when three things happened, all in one moment. One, Precious Angel jiggled off her spike on the top. Two, she fell to the ground. Three, and I honestly don’t know how, but I stumbled in my slippers and trod on her. She made a noise like biting a Crunchie. The living room wobbled a bit like an earthquake, and my ears, eyes and lips prickled hot. ‘Bloody bugger!’ I hissed over and over like a lawn sprinkler. Precious Angel, made in Venice centuries ago, was—no, is, bloody bugger, is—smashed mirrory eggshells. I prayed to God, hard, to do a miracle, but when I opened my eyes she was still in dozens of sharp bits. I told the Devil he could have my soul if he’d fix her—but I only said it twice, so it didn’t count. My mum and dad will murder me. My birthday on January the twelfth’ll be cancelled, definitely. All my birthdays, ever.

Precious Angel’s broken face was like a little mask on my thumb. She looked so far-away, like my mum hanging out the washing. Could I find an exact same angel in an antique shop or in the Yellow Pages? I get 50p a week pocket money and I’ve got £28 in the TSB. My parents mightn’t notice if it’s a slightly different angel. But Julia’d rat on me, for sure. She’s in her room now with her stupid friend Kate. They’re sposed to be studying for their mock exams but they’re playing Dare! by Human League. Julia’s learnt all the lyrics off by heart but Kate has Simon Le Bon pinned on her ceiling, over her bed, like a pink hairy spider. The Upton Punks’ll kick your head in if you say you like New Romantics or even Gary Numan. But he can’t be a puff, he’s dead futuristic, he’s got a friend named ‘Five’. Every Thursday after Top of the Pops my dad says, ‘I wish that little lot would kindly deposit themselves down a very deep mineshaft.’ He likes Abba, though he calls them ‘The Abba’ which makes Julia roll her eyeballs.

So anyway, I scooped up all the bits of Precious Angel in my hanky and put the decorations under the Christmas tree in the bottom of the Narnia wardrobe. Then my mum nagged me to do my thank-you letters. Writing thank-you letters is worse than double maths. I’d rather she just sent all the presents back.

There’s adverts for stuff called Superglue that say it fixes anything. Could I glue Precious Angel back together? What a terrible, awful secret. More of a rotten tooth than a secret, one that’ll never fall out.

I tried reading The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World to take my mind off what had happened when the phone rang in my dad’s office. He’s got an answering machine like on The Rockford Files but he forgets to leave it switched on. The ringing went on, one minute, two, three. Julia couldn’t hear it cause ‘Don’t You Want Me’ was turned up so loud. Mum didn’t hear cause she was in the utility room and the washing machine was on its berserk cycle. I crossed the landing. Dad’s office is always cool, and smells of cigarettes and filing cabinets. He smokes silver Lambert & Butlers and I like how the boxes smell. His computer hasn’t got any games on it, he’d kill me if I touched it anyway cause they cost so much. He writes on a big whiteboard in code, like JAN2ND*RM L.THOMAS/RE:ORDER Q/44*B’HAM/MART (!) SW/CORN&PS/. ‘SW/CORN&PS/’ is about sweetcorn and peas. My dad’s an Area Representative for Iceland, the supermarket, not the country. Iceland give him a Jupiter-red Rover 3200 and change it every two years.

So anyway, I picked the receiver up and said our number. The other person breathed in sharp, like she’d cut herself. ‘I can’t hear you,’ I said, ‘and my dad’s not here.’ Then her baby cried like the end of the world was coming, and she hung up. Must be a wrong number. My dad doesn’t know any babies. He’s got a pencil-sharpener machine clipped on to his steel desk. You put the pencil in the hole, and turn the handle. I like the smell. My dad only has H pencils. My favourite’s 2B. His swivelly chair’s ace, it’s like the Millennium Falcon’s laser cannon. I aimed over the cornfield towards the cockerel tree and blasted everything between home and the Malvern Hills. Nobody’d notice that Precious Angel was missing if something even worse happened, like a war or volcano or everyone starved.

There was somebody at the front door. I flew downstairs two steps at a time and took the last eight in one amazing bound.

Moron said the pond in the wood was frozen over thick enough to walk on. I didn’t tell Mum, cause she’d make me promise not to go on it, then later she’d say, ‘Look in my eye and say you kept your promise, Jason.’ She says, ‘Boys lie all the time, but eyes, never.’ That’s rubbish. You just stare right back and lie.

So anyway, I said I wanted fresh air cause adults like hearing that. Mum asked what my new black anorak’d done to offend me. The truth is, if you wear black it’s like you think you’re a biker or hard or something. I told her my duffel was warmer and we left. Moron smells of gravy, wears too-short trousers and lives down Gilbert’s End in a cottage that smells of gravy too. Our house smells of alpine air-freshener. Moron’s real name is Stuart Moran, it rhymes with ‘warren’, and when we’re alone I just call him ‘Stuart’, but names aren’t simple. Hard kids get called by their first names, like Tom Branch is Tom. Boys one rank lower like Jack Biggs have friendly nicknames quite often, like Bigsy. Next down are kids like me who just get called by their surname. Julia calls me ‘Thing’ but your own sister doesn’t count, cause all older sisters are evil scum, they can’t help it. Below us are kids who’ve got piss-take nicknames like Moron. Nicholas Briar is ‘Knickerless Bra’. Being a boy is like being in the army. If you don’t use the right name and rank, you end up in a scrap. Girls use Christian names more, and they usually don’t fight cept for Dawn Madden who’s probably a boy gone wrong in some experiment. Sometimes I wish I was a girl too. If I ever said so, the Upton Punks’d kill me and spray BENDER on my gravestone. It’d be even worse than if anyone knew the poet Eliot Bolivar in the parish magazine is actually me. That was my biggest secret, until I crushed the Angel. If I had one wish, it’d be to wake up tomorrow really old—twenty—with all my problems behind me. Even being Julia’s better than being eleven. On her eighteenth birthday last summer she was allowed to go to Tanya’s nightclub in Worcester. Tanya’s has got the only kryptonite laser in Europe. Grown-ups can buy anything, go to Alton Towers whenever they want and don’t worry about ranks or bullying, but they’re still always complaining.

So anyway, as we walked to the pond Moron talked about his Scalextric he’d got for Christmas. On Boxing Day its transformer blew up and nearly killed his entire family. He should write to Esther Rantzen on That’s Life who’ll get the shop to swap it for a bigger one, I told him. Moron said it was bought from a Brummie at Tewkesbury Market. I didn’t admit I don’t know what a Brummie is—it might be like ‘Bummer’ which is a man who kisses another man. Moron asked what I’d got for Christmas. I’d actually got £12.50 in book tokens, but liking books is a bit gay so I said I’d got the Game of Life. You win by driving a tiny Ford Escort around the board of life the fastest and by getting the most money.

Through the trees we heard kids shouting and screaming, like a zoo with no cages, and we raced the rest of the way. I won cause Moron stepped on a frozen tractor-tyre and his foot got sucked into the mud underneath.

The pond was fantastic, like a massive glacier mint, but dead slippy, and I fell loads before I could skate a whole circuit. I say ‘skate’ but most of us just slid in our trainers or wellies. Ryan Badger had proper Olympic ice skates but he’d only lend them you if you paid him 5p, though he let Tom Branch and Keith Saunston go for free. Squelch yelled, ‘Arse over tit!’ at whoever fell over, but Squelch’s funny in his head so no one ever thumps him one. He was born too early, Mrs Dendy told my mum. Keith Saunston rode his Chopper on to the ice and kept his balance for a few seconds. He’s going to be a stuntman when he grows up. He pulled a wheelie but the bike flew over his head and twisted the handlebars so badly it looked like Uri Geiler had attacked it. Then Nigel Baldwin said we should play British Bulldogs actually on the pond. When Tom Branch said ‘Okay, I’m on for it,’ it was decided. I hate British Bulldogs, in fact Miss Jekyll banned it at school after Sam Lloyd knocked half of Oswald Little’s front teeth out, not on purpose. I had to pretend I wanted to play or I’d get called a chicken or a ponce. Our house is on the new estate but most of the village kids live down Winnington Gardens. Winnington Gardens is a big oval of council houses around a green that’s muddy even in summer. Its gardens are scrubby, not like on our estate, and its cars are mostly Death Traps. The dogs and houses don’t like me. Kids from Winnington Gardens like Ross Wilcox are just waiting for me to come over posh so they can put the boot in.

So anyway, about twenty boys including Dawn Madden stood in a bunch on the frozen pond. Tom Branch and Saunston were team captains, and Baldwin and Bigsy were vice captains. Then they picked us, one by one, like a slave market. I was number thirteen, two after Ross Wilcox. Moron and Squelch were last. Tom Branch and Saunston were joking, saying, ‘No, you have ’em both, I want to win!’ Moron and Squelch grinned but what else could they do? Baldwin won the toss so our team got to be Bulldogs first, and Tom Branch’s team were the Catchers. Coats were put at both ends of the pond for goalposts. The Bulldogs skated to one end, the Catchers to the other. Here we go. My heart was drumming dead loud. You crouch and yell: ‘British Bulldogs, one! two! three!’, then you charge, screaming like kamikazes.

I slipped, to let the Bulldogs ahead smash into the enemy Catchers. About half our team went down, struggling to slip free before their Catchers pinned both shoulders to the ice for long enough to shout ‘British Bulldogs, one! two! three!’ Peter Schooling and Sam Lloyd were scrapping and bumped me, but I stayed up. Ross Wilcox homed in, matching my swerves, left and right. He’s the fastest sprinter in our year but he’s a massive prat. When he grabbed my sleeve, I just grabbed his arm and spun him into hyperspace. Oswald Little did a poxy rugby tackle on me—I spose he wants to keep the teeth he’s still got. Baldwin shouted, ‘Ye-shaaa, Jacey-boy!’ to me when I got through the goal. I felt fantastic. We watched the duels on the ice. About a third of our force had been captured. That’s why I hate British Bulldogs—it turns teammates into enemies. It reminds me of that film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So anyway, us survivors charged again. The second pass is much harder than the first, obviously, cause there’s lots more Catchers than Bulldogs and they pick off the least hard kids first. I’d already proved I wasn’t chicken by getting through the first pass, so when Wilcox and Baz McKay and Dawn Madden downed me, I just lay there. The more you struggle, the more you get hurt. Their faces were red and twisted and it wouldn’t have surprised me if they turned into Bull Mastiffs and ripped out my throat. Specially Dawn Madden. She’s got cruel eyes like she’s Chinese but I think about her sometimes and I can’t stop. Something in my pocket went crunch under McKay’s knee. It was the Precious Angel bits grinding to powder. Not even Superglue would fix her now. Wilcox punched the air like he’d scored a hat-trick at Old Trafford. I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, three against one, well done.’ In my heart, I was still a Bulldog. Baldwin and Darren Drinkwater had skated into the thick of the Catchers like punching windmills, but Tom Branch and Bigsy decked them and then Keith Saunston yelled ‘Pile-on!’ A squirmy pyramid of boys grew higher until we heard a chainsaw roaring through the trees.

It wasn’t a chainsaw but Tom Branch’s brother Stephen on his Suzuki 450cc scrambler. British Bulldogs was aborted, cause Stephen Branch is in the Royal Navy on a frigate called HMS Sheffield, he’s got every Led Zep LP ever made and he’s shaken hands with Peter Shilton. The older kids gathered around the Suzuki and smoked and stuff. Ross Wilcox started smoking over Christmas. The older kids talked about The Day After, a film about the nuclear war. There’ll be a winter night that’ll last fifty years. When the cans of peas run out, the survivors’ll eat each other till only the worst cannibal’s left alive.

‘When there’s a nuclear war,’ said Nigel Baldwin, ‘I’m going to steal a Pontiac Firebird, drive to Birmingham and watch it from a tower block.’

Ross Wilcox breathed out cigarette smoke and spoke to us middle-rank kids, ‘If it hadn’t been for Winston Churchill you lot’d all be speaking German now.’ Wilcox’s always speaking crap, but I didn’t say so in case the smokers ganged up with him.

I was dying for a wee so I went to find somewhere in the trees, near the deserted cottage. You mustn’t say ‘dying for a wee’ or you’ll get called a puff, you say, ‘I’m bustin’ for a waz,’ and you flob. I’m not very good at flobbing yet, so it hung from my lip and I got gob on my duffel sleeve. I trod through brackeny stuff into the frozen woods. Dead leaves crackled and the mud was crunchy. I like being where there aren’t any boys. Pits of gravelly snow lay where the sun couldn’t melt it. No good for snowballs. Eat it and you’d cut your gums. Nero killed his guests by making them eat glass grapes, just for a laugh.

So anyway, I stumbled to a holly hedge around the deserted cottage and peed no-handed into that. Holly trees you can’t trust, like willows and hawthorns. A green woodpecker came swooping and sat on a spike. The deserted cottage is red brick and has four windows like infant-school kids draw. It’s even got a chimney, but there’s never any smoke. Houses are heads and windows are usually eyes, but the deserted cottage doesn’t give anything away. Magpies sit on its ridge tiles. I was writing my autograph in piss on the frosty ground when the gate swung open. An old woman was there, staring at me.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I blustered, zipping up my fly before I’d finished. ‘I didn’t know anyone lived here.’ I braced myself for a rollocking. My mum would massacre any kid peeing into her garden.

But she just stared, a mean, sour aunt from black-and-white times. ‘Shows what you know.’ Her face was shrivelled like a conker soaked too long in vinegar and so was her voice. ‘My brother and I were born in this cottage. We’ve never gone anywhere.’ Her throat swung and wobbled like a turkey’s. ‘You’re one of the pond boys, aren’t you? You woke my brother up from his nap. He’s queer about boys. Some days he loves you dearly, but other times, my, you give him the howling furies.’

‘Oh…sorry.’

‘You’ll be sorrier when the ice cracks. Do you know how many boys are under there now? Eleven, and they’re very sorry indeed. Matthew Phipps, the butcher’s boy, he was the last. One more for a nice round dozen.’

Lunch was fish fingers, chips, sprouts and tomato ketchup. Sprouts make me puke and stink the house out but Mum says I’ve got to eat five. You hit the bottom of the ketchup bottle until a sudden glollop drowns them and takes their taste away. ‘Dad?’ I asked.

‘Yes?’ he answered, mimicking the way I’d said ‘Dad?’

‘If you fall through ice and you drown, what happens to your body?’

Dad gave my mum that look. ‘Why do you ask?’

Put enough details into a fib, it’ll become a story. ‘In Arctic Adventure, this baddie falls through the ice after losing against Hal Hunt, and he gets tombed in by ice. Then in the year 2727 AD he gets found by an alien race who thaw him out again, and—’

My dad held up his hand to say Halt. ‘His body would decay and the fish would eat him.’

‘Clive,’ said my mum, disapprovingly.

‘Jason asked a question.’

‘Thing’s being grotesque,’ complained Julia, ‘just for the sake of it.’

I ignored her. ‘Even cods and trouts? Not just piranha fish and sharks?’

‘Uh-huh.’ My dad cut his fish fingers into precise fifths. ‘Every little fish in the neighbourhood swim’d up. “My turn! My turn! I want my share!” They’d nibble flakes off your poor baddie until nothing was left of him.’

‘I thought,’ said my mum, ‘of doing the guest room in “Zen”, after all. “Snowdonia” is a touch bright, I think, for a south-facing room.’

My dad looked at her, sort of nasty, the way he does a lot recently. ‘Can’t you at least wait until it’s warm enough to open the windows before filling the place with paint fumes?’

‘May I get down?’ asked Julia.

Mum frowned. ‘But it’s butterscotch Angel Delight for pudding.’

‘I’ll grab an apple. I’ve got to get on with my Civil War revision.’

‘I wish you’d told me you weren’t hungry.’

Just then my dad remembered something. ‘Did you go into my office this morning, Jason?’

My sister hovered in the doorway to watch. Grown-ups generally don’t bluff kids, except for Mr Prosser our headmaster who hates the whole world. Julia reckons he snarls insults at his bathroom mirror.

‘The truth, Jason,’ warned my mum.

I must have left the pencil stuck in the pencil sharpener when Moron called. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you see the phone was ringing on and on, so—’

‘What’s the rule about not going into my office?’

‘I thought it was an emergency and—’

‘What’s the rule about not going into my office?’ My dad’s like iron scissors, sometimes.

‘That’s funny,’ said Julia, unexpectedly.

My dad glared at her. ‘What is?’

‘When you took Thing to Worcester last week, the phone rang in your office for ever such a long time. I mean, about fifteen minutes. Literally. In the end I had to go in there—the ringing was driving me crazy, and I thought you might have been in an accident or something. I said “Hello” but the other person just put the phone down.’

‘That’s just like the call I answered!’ I said, seeing a way out. ‘Did you hear a baby in the background too?’

‘Hold your horses, the pair of you!’ Dad’s voice was an inch from snapping. ‘If some joker’s making prank calls, I definitely don’t want you answering my office phone! If it happens again, just pick up the receiver, cut the line and leave it off the hook. Understand?’

Julia and I nodded.

‘I asked you a question!’

‘Yes,’ we both said.

Julia went, and I wanted to get down too, but I was scared to ask permission. Mum mentioned a special whistle you can blow down the phone at nuisance callers to burst their eardrums, and Dad answered yes, that sounds worth looking into, but in the same way as he says ‘we’ll see’, and ‘we’ll see’ means ‘just forget it’. We ate Angel Delight without speaking. Butterscotch flavour isn’t as nice as I used to think. Afterwards, I had to do the drying up while my dad did the dishes. He switched on Radio 4 for the weather forecast. Tonight it’ll be minus sixteen degrees C in Glasgow, freezing fog’ll make for hazardous driving conditions throughout the north, and we can expect temperatures to stay well below zero everywhere except the extreme west. Dad told me off for putting the teaspoons where the dessertspoons go. He stared across the glassy lawn and sighed like he’d entered a competition for the world’s unhappiest man. There were icicles hanging on the summer house. I bet they put the cutlery higgledy-piggledy in Stuart Moran’s house.

Nobody was on the frozen pond. Superman II was on TV, that’s why, but I saw it at the pictures on Robin Dukes’s birthday ages ago. Superman gives up his special powers just to sit in a silvery bed with Lois Lane. Who’d agree to such a stupid deal, really, in real life? He could fly. He could turn back time.

So anyway, I skated around in figures of eight, slicing lurkers with my light sabre during the nuclear winter. January woods are noisier than you’d think. Rooks go craw…craw…craw…like vague people who can’t remember why they came upstairs. Brittle boughs creak like they’re polystyrene, twigs snap, farmers’ shotguns crack, then echo, like slammed doors, miles away. Do the eleven kids mind me skating on their tomb? Do they want new kids to fall through? Do they miss their parents? Depends what their parents were like, I spose. I made sure no one was spying, laid down and pressed my ear against the ice. I couldn’t hear anything, but bubbles were frozen into the ice like an Aero bar. Spose they’re speech bubbles? When the ice melts, do the boys’ words come out, scrambled up? A pheasant flapped across the pond. The sky was milky with twilight.

I got up, but my feet flew off, then my ankle bone came whacking down. A crack exploded like an ice cube dropped in warm squash, and splinters of pain shot to my jaw, my middle fingers and the top of my head. You know when you’ve hurt yourself badly. It’s not a one-off pain that dies away. Serious pain stays and stays. I sort of half-crawled, half-snaked off the ice, whimpering. My left foot was just agony and I cried a bit, I couldn’t help it. Giant Haystacks would’ve cried. Headlights from the main road flashed through the flinty trees, but that was half a mile away, and the moon was nearer than that. I tried not to think of the word ‘evil’, but there’s a scarier word than that, it’s ‘infinity’. Once infinity’s got you, you’ll never get out.

The knocker on the not-deserted cottage made me think of a sledgehammer smashing ice and bits flying off everywhere. ‘Excuse me,’ I gasped. Pain made everything underwatery. ‘I hurt my ankle.’

‘So I see.’

‘Can I phone my dad to come in his car and get me?’

‘My brother and I don’t much care for telephones. Cars can’t reach us from the lane. I can see to your ankle, if you want.’

‘Yes, please.’

Inside was colder than out, and gloomy as an ocean trench. Bolts on the door behind me slid home. A blurry oblong glowed at the far end of the hallway. ‘Down you go,’ her voice rippled, ‘I’ll be along presently.’ The floor was stone worn smooth. I hobbled, leaning on the wall, wincing with every half-step. Steep wooden stairs twisted up into blackness. I could see my breath. The hallway seemed to go on and on. I was sinking down it. A dazzling needle of pain went in and out of my ankle with every step.

The living room smelled of mould and musty cardboard, and it was crowded with museumy stuff. An empty parrot cage, a clothes mangle, a towering dresser. The bulb was so weak nothing had a clear shape. No TV, no stereo and no books, nothing new or electric. The wallpaper was Bourbon biscuit brown with Custard Cream wavy stripes and bubbly places where it was peeling off. A gas fire hissed blue, but it was still damp and chilly. Swans made of pear-drop glass swam across the mantelpiece. There were big plants in tiny pots, their pale, blind roots feeling over the rims. So cold! I clenched my muscles and sank into the sofa, trying to find a position to make my ankle hurt less. She came through a doorway strung with beads holding a china bowl in one hand, a smiley mug in the other. She sat on a stool. ‘Take off your sock, then.’ The bowl had bread sauce stuff in, which she smeared on to my throbbing ankle. ‘This is a poultice. It’ll draw out all the pain.’

‘It tickles,’ I said, hugging myself for warmth.

‘It’ll be over before it’s begun.’ Soon my ankle was covered in goo. It crusted over like snot. ‘The more you struggle, the more you get hurt.’ She handed me the smiley mug. ‘Drink this.’

‘It smells like coins.’

‘It’s for drinking, not for sniffing.’

So I swigged back the liquid in one go without tasting it, like you do Milk of Magnesia.

‘Is your brother at home?’ I asked.

‘Where else would he be, Matthew? Shush now, or he’ll hear you.’

‘My name’s not Matthew,’ but I couldn’t fight the shivery bitterness any more. Odd thing is, as soon as I gave in, I was warmer. I tried to picture my family sitting in their living room, watching The Paul Daniels Magic Show, but their faces were wrong, like on the backs of spoons. Down I floated in feathery spirals.

I woke on her saggy sofa. My Timex had stopped, at five past seven, or twenty-five to one, the room was too dim to tell. If it was tomorrow morning already there’d be a manhunt with police dogs. And then when they found out I hadn’t been kidnapped, but just been dozing in the deserted cottage, Mr Prosser’d tell the whole assembly, I’d be a laughing stock and even Moron and Squelch’d get picked before me. Bloody bugger, I knew I had better move. My bare foot stuck to the stone floor, and I remembered my ankle. But it was healed. I drew circles with my foot, and put my weight on it—just a twinge. I took out my hanky to wipe the poultice off. Precious Angel powder flew out. The glinty grains hung in the muddied air. I put my sock and trainer back on. Where was she?

‘Hello?’ I called.

I peered through the beads into a bare kitchen. The beads swayed and clacked. ‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Anyone there?’ I tested the back door. Locked, no key, no mat to hide it under even. Back in the living room there was a velvet hood over the parrot cage. I drifted down the hallway to the front door. Locked too, and anyway I couldn’t reach the top bolt. ‘Hello?’ I called up the stairs. ‘I have to go home now!’ A lakeful of silence. I hauled myself up the creaky steps. My fingertips brushed a doorknob. I knocked and listened—nothing. The doorknob felt like a cold snowball in my palm.

The moon behind the frosted glass was half-dissolved, how the eleven boys must see it. Here she is, under a patchwork quilt. Her dentures were in a pint glass on her bedside table. ‘Hello,’ my voice trembled, ‘I have to go home now.’ Nothing. I crossed the wonky floor. The room seemed to have shrunk since I came in. She’s so still, still as ladies on tombs. She might be dead. She’s got a black hollow instead of a mouth, and shrivelly pits for eyes. If she’s dead, I’ll need 999. Could I force a window open? Get to the phone box by St Gabriel’s or The Swan? But spose they all say it’s my fault? Time goes by. Her windpipe bulges as her soul squeezes through. Watch. A blizzard breathes through her mouth, a silent roaring. It hangs in the air, not going anywhere.

Photograph © Diane Cordell