Robert sat on top of the garden wall, looking over at the field. The old barn looked dark and forbidding alone at the edge of the field, next to the wall. He could see a large black bird strutting along the roof of the barn. He guessed it was either a rook or a crow. But he was not even sure whether rooks and crows were different birds or different names for the same bird.
Just as Robert was beginning to get bored with just sitting on the wall, Susan, the girl from next-door, climbed the wall at the rear of their garden. She stepped over the top of the fence and sat down beside Robert. Susan was thirteen, a year younger than Robert, but - somehow - Robert always felt that she was the wiser of the two of them, if not the elder.
"What shall we do today?"
"I... I dunno really." Robert couldn't really make sense of why she wanted to be with him. It had not been that long since he had started noticing girls. There had been a period in his life when girls just seem to have disappeared from the world around him. But now they suddenly seemed to be appearing everywhere.
"What about those tunnels in the barn you were talking about yesterday? I think I'd like to see them."
Robert shifted uncomfortably. Something about being with Susan in the dark claustrophobic tunnels seemed to make him feel unusually warm. He could feel the heat spreading up the sides of his neck.
Earlier in the summer holiday, Robert and his friend John had sat on the same wall watching the barn as it was filled with bales of hay. It had taken two lorry loads to fill the barn. The boys had hidden in the long grass at the base of the wall as the farm hands returned to the farmhouse, rubbing straw from their hands. When it seemed as though the men would not be returning to the barn, the two boys crept around to the back of the barn and squeezed in through a broken window.
For several days, the two boys secretly constructed a tunnel through into the centre of the mound of hay bales, shifting and rearranging the bales to make a large room deep in the middle. They made a roof for the room by using old abandoned fence posts as rafters to hold the bales above it.
Robert and John had sat silently close together in the pitch-black room they had created, listening fearfully to the rough bantering voices of the farm hands as they walked and climbed over the hay bales above the boy's heads. The boys shared a great deal of relief and excitement when the men left. The roof had held and they had remained undetected. The elation had spurred another frantic bout of tunnel making, with secret exits all around the barn. If the farm hands did return, and if they did find the tunnels, the two boys believed they could be out anywhere around the barn in a few seconds and away safe over the garden wall in less than a minute.
John was away with his parents for the last two weeks of the summer holiday and Robert had been lonely for a while. He spent most of the first few days just sitting there on the garden wall watching the sheep and waiting for time to pass.
"Okay. Let's go then." He jumped down into the field, before Susan could notice the reddening of his neck and cheeks. He was shocked to find that he was holding out his hand to help her down from the wall, but Susan overlooked his gaffe and jumped down beside him as he pretended to continue with his stretching exercises.
"It gets very dark, cramped in there," Robert said as they walked across the field.
"It's all right I'm not scared of the dark. She turned to face him. "Are you?"
"No, 'course not." Robert swung at some nettles with a stick, decapitating them. "I just thought I'd better warn you, 'cos there's no turning back once you're in there." They arrived at the barn. The old wooden walls were grey with age, warped and broken in places. Susan pointed at the locked doors. Robert shook his head and led the way around to the side of the barn farthest away from the other farm buildings.
