They’d left the Co-Op with a pocketful of change rattling in Sam’s jeans. A home baked pasty had never tasted so good. Flakes of pastry fell from Sam’s mouth as he took another huge bite, chasing it with a mouthful of coke. Across the street, he noticed a policeman walking up the other side of the road. Sam wasn’t sure if the police officer was in fancy dress, but Sam had seen the helmet he wore in movies and old news reels. It was the hard kind, that looked kind of like a nipple on top. The cop caught Sam’s eye and stopped. He definitely carried himself like some cops Sam had had the misfortune of meeting. He’d been stopped and searched by police in London more than once. All his friends from the estate had too, those with darker skin conspicuously more often. If there was one thing his mother had told him about interactions with the police was not to resist or run. Give them no reason to escalate. Swallow your pride. Remember your manners, use all the ‘yes sirs’ and ‘no misses’ you need to placate them until she or a lawyer could get to him, and, in her exact words, ‘rip them a new arsehole.’ This cop was eyeballing him, and as Sam’s mind went to all the movie scenes and mobile phone footage of police brutality on people with his skin colour, the man doffed the rim of his helmet and walked on up the street.

  Sam always ate when he was nervous, so he took another chunk out of his pasty.

  ‘Hungry, then?’ The edges of Tink’s lips quirked. She walked next to him down the narrow pavement, so that their arms almost touched.

  ‘Starving,’ Sam replied with his mouth full. Then he became self-conscious, using his forearm to cover his mouth.

  Tink looked amused, not in any mirthful way, but the pleasure on her face made Sam blush and his crotch tighten in an involuntary and mortifying way. He immediately tried to not think about it, which of course made it twice as bad. Swallowing, he attempted to misdirect his mind, or more precisely, his hormones: ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘There’s a park up ahead.’

  ‘Cool!’ Sam said, eating some more and thinking how stupid that sounded.

  ‘It’s not; nothing is cool around here. But it’s somewhere to sit while we slowly die of boredom.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Cool!’ Christ! Sam never said cool but was unable to stop himself from sounding like a proper twat. He felt Tink regarding him with a sideways glance, and he flushed hot, desperate to think of something, anything that didn’t make him sound like a gibbering idiot, but Tink got there first.

  ‘You a city boy, then?’

  Sam could see the park at the end of the road, sitting on the flat head of the T-junction. It sat at the cusp of the dunes, so close that the sand was spilling through the fence on the far side. A young child, of maybe five or six, stood looking to stage right, as Sam answered.

  ‘Hackney, in London.’

  ‘I know where Hackney is.’

  ‘Sorry, yeah, of course.’

  ‘You don’t sound like you’re from the East End.’

  Sam quickly swallowed. He was so hungry; he devoured the pasty in wolfish chomps. ‘My mum was big on speaking properly at home, but...’ He switched into the pan-urban street accent of the UK’s internet generation. ‘I can turn it on if I need to, blud. Don’t always need to sound bougie.’

  A raucous peel of laughter burst from Tink, and she punched Sam in his arm. ‘That was wicked. Do it again.’

  Sam blushed harder, but he didn’t care. He could see the child up ahead, and could make out it was a girl, wearing a dirty sky-blue t-shirt and equally dirty green shorts. She walked a few paces across the playground and peered down at something at her feet, but Sam wasn’t really paying attention. He had more important things to do, like making Tink laugh again.

  ‘Is you blottin’? Man can’t waste no time chattin’; man got big tings’ need doing.’

  She laughed, putting a hand to her flat belly and punching him in the arm once more. ‘You’re hilarious. What was your name again?’

  Oh no, she didn’t even remember. ‘Sam.’

  From the direction of playground, there was a flash of movement. When he checked the park with a flick of his gaze, there was nothing, not even the little girl in those grubby clothes.

  ‘Sam.’ She tried out the name. ‘Maybe you can save me from a fate worse than death.’ She said it with a hand, warm and birdlike, on his shoulder. They came to a stop at the end of the road, and Sam felt an unbidden, hard, and painful erection form in the crotch of his jeans at her touch. He adjusted his hoodie to be sure it was covered. Oblivious, Tink checked for traffic, before they stepped out, thin drifts of sand mottling the road under their feet. Her hand dropped from his shoulder, and Sam’s stomach churned not from hunger or from digesting his half-finished lunch but from longing.

  The playground was empty, but for the rusting skeletons of playthings lying on the cracked and potholed concourse. Tink went in ahead, her buttocks mesmerically bunching up in turns inside her denim shorts. Whilst his crotch thought differently, Sam chided himself for looking. His mother’s words rang in his head, which he knew she’d appropriated from Aretha Franklin, because it was one of those songs she’d always turn up full blast in Molly Micra and they’d both sing along. ‘R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Respect, Sam.’ She’d cuffed him on the back of the head more than once when she’d caught his eyes lingering on pretty girls when they walked by. ‘Lust is a vice; but love is nice, my darling boy.’

  Tink took a seat on a swing. There was another next to her. Sam looked around for the little girl as he sat down, the chains creaking in the rusting rings welded to the swing’s frame. It had once been red, but most of the paint had long since blistered and flaked away, showing through the black primer, also grey with age. From what he’d seen of the place so far, from the beach house and all the way through to the park, Hernshore seemed like it had seen better days. Everything was either a little or a lot worn down.

  ‘Looking for someone?’ Tink said, beginning to rock herself back and forth without letting her feet leave the ground. The chains brayed, like a rusty toy donkey at the bottom of a toy box.

  ‘I thought I saw a little girl playing here.’ He looked down at his feet and saw one of those stones Michael had mentioned at the house. What were they called? He couldn’t remember, but it was white, about the size of a small chocolate chip cookie with a slightly irregular circular hole through the middle of it. He picked it up as he ate.

  ‘A witch’s stone. Brings good luck, does that and wards off dark magic,’ said Tink in a blasé voice. Sam pocketed the stone—he could do with a bit of luck—and took in his surroundings.

  He felt a twinge of anxiety at such a young child being outside playing unsupervised. The way the little girl had been so grubby didn’t sit right. The dunes started behind where they sat; in fact, they had been blown right up to the dilapidated steel fence which enclosed the playground and tumbled through. Sand spread in a thick layer under the swings and across to the other play pieces: a slide, a roundabout, and a couple of hobby seahorses on preposterously large blue springs. To their left the road at the top of the T-junction carried on, skirting the boundary of the dunes, houses lining the pavements. These weren’t as old as the bricolage of buildings which greeted them once they flew out of Hernshore Wood in Ma Tunstall’s beaten-up Land Rover. They were newer but not new, simplistic and angular council houses from the 1970s or ‘80s. Featureless boxes made of dark red brick and beige mortar, adorned with thin concrete windowsills and a similar slab of cast-crete over the front doors. Sam knew places like these. He’d grown up in the city equivalents, replete with rising damp, wonky or missing roof tiles, cracked and boarded up windows like bad teeth and black eyes. Weeds finagled footholds in drains, gutters, and chimney pots. In fact, at a second glance, they were worse than Sam’s estate. People had pride in their tower blocks and Ends. Little old ladies and artists alike, with window boxes of flowers or potatoes growing in sacks alongside a miniature greenhouse on their six by three balconies. There were the drug dealers too—no doubt about that. But even though his block, Austin King Tower, was poor in money terms, it was rich with life. Money doesn’t make you better and being poor doesn’t make you lesser.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  These houses were more like squats no one, not even Whitechapel and Spitalfields’ Council, would put people in. Sam thought of how the little girl in her dirty clothes seemed to match the houses. That idea made him sad and more anxious, and he cast around for her, seeing nothing.

  ‘What’s it like being a lord?’

  ‘What?’ Sam was baffled by the question and nearly choked on the last enormous hunk of pasty he’d stuffed into his mouth.

  ‘You’re a lord, right? Or at least the son of a lord.’

  He swallowed with difficulty. ‘Am I?’

  ‘Are you taking the piss?’ Tink’s stopped rocking on her swing and watched him circumspectly. She must have seen the confusion written all over Sam’s face. ‘How can you not know? You’re a Lorimer.’ She said Michael’s surname like it meant something important, but to him she might have well said ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones.’

  Sam shrugged. ‘I met the guy a few days ago.’

  It was Tink’s turn to be baffled: ‘What?’

  And so, Sam told her his sorry tale, or at least the four-page treatment instead of the hundred-page screenplay. There were some pieces of the story no one needed to know, like those last weeks with his mother and what went on behind that door with the bleeps and huffs of those death machines. She listened to how he was from a tower block in London and grew up never knowing his dad. It had been him and his mum against the world. How she was a talented film-maker but gave it up when Sam came along, but she taught a bit of film studies part-time at the local tech. He told her how he and his mother watched movies together, and he made films too, and he wanted to be a director or a cinematographer or something to do with movies when he was older. He showed her clips he’d filmed himself on his phone as he talked. Tink leaned in, smelling of sweet musk and herbal shampoo, making his throat feel narrow and his tongue too big in his mouth, like a fat, lumbering worm. But then his mother got ill out of the blue. Sam didn’t tell Tink about how the doctors said words like ‘rare’ and ‘aggressive’ and ‘quality of life’ or what any of those words ended up really meaning. And he didn’t tell her all the details about how ever since life felt like a boat throwing him around in a storm, churning, spinning him around, pitching him from here to there, from the East End to Notting Hill, then from London to Hernshore. Instead, he just said ‘And then she died a two weeks ago and left me a letter in her will, along with another one for Michael, who apparently is my dad. He didn’t know about me either. Mum had kept it from both of us.’ It was hard not to sound bitter at this. Sam finished with, ‘It took a while to sort it out. I was in foster care for a week or so. Michael wanted a paternity test, and here I am. I didn’t know he was a Lord; he never said.’

  Tink’s mouth was agog, and her green eyes glittered with tears. Sam didn’t want her to pity him, so he shrugged like it was no big deal and took a swig of his coke. Tink’s hands tightened around the swing’s chains, and they groaned when she shifted to look over her shoulder at the dunes hunched behind them. Sam stuffed the plastic wrapping of his lunch in his hoodie’s pocket. He’d been getting used to all the uncomfortable silences that punctuated his new life, but with Tink he wanted to fill it, make her laugh again, hear that bright and raucous gale of joy blow away his troubles for a few seconds. She didn’t laugh, but she did speak, concern putting two wavy furrows in her brow.

  ‘You don’t know anything about being a Lorimer.’ It was a statement, but it felt like a question.

  Sam gave a short, wan laugh. ‘What’s to know?’

  A salty breeze picked up and blew Tink’s short fringe across her eyes. A spray of sand kicked into the air, making Sam blink hard. Tink shifted nervously in her seat.

  ‘How old are you?’

  The question didn’t seem as casual anymore. It had an edge.

  ‘Sixteen. And you?’

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes were moving, searching unseen knowledge in her mind, and she stood, rubbing her arms. The skin there had goose-fleshed, and she checked the dunes behind the park with a furtive glance.

  ‘We should go.’ Tink’s confidence had disappeared, and she hugged herself, rounding shoulders.

  ‘O-kay.’ Sam separated the two syllables as he got up. The swings tinkled, and the warm breeze blew harder, throwing up more sand.

  Tink stuck out her hand. ‘Come on.’ There was urgency in her voice. Confused, Sam took her hand. This girl’s moods veered wildly, but a small thrill went right from his hand to his thumping heart when their skin touched; her fingers curled around his palm tightly. ‘We shouldn’t be here.’ She tugged him away from the swings and the dunes, back towards the road.

  ‘What’s wrong? Did I say something?’ Sam searched for some explanation. ‘Is it my age? Don’t they like teenagers being in the park?’ The place was a dump, but he supposed it wouldn’t be unusual for people to get angry at teenagers hanging around in a playpark meant for little children. Still, it didn’t feel right, not considering Tink’s previous swagger. She pulled him on until the slack between their arms was gone and Sam stumbled to keep up.

  ‘I didn’t think gran was being serious,’ Tink muttered to herself as they hurried, checking left and right. Sand spat against Sam’s cheeks. The wind was a warm breath, tainted with salty-sweet decay, ruffling Tink’s fringe around her face. They had passed the roundabout, which sat in the middle of the playground, when Tink pulled up, teetering on her tiptoes at the edge of a hole.

  Pieces fell into place for Sam. This was the spot the little girl he’d seen had been looking down at. When they’d initially walked through the playground, Sam had clocked the small hole, which was one of many in the compacted earth, and thought it was nothing more than a big pothole or maybe a rabbit’s burrow. Now, it was at least three feet wide and growing. Sand at its circumference was dissolving with a serpentine hiss, expanding towards Tink’s toes. Her knees locked and her momentum carried her top half forward, throwing off her balance. All she needed to do was take a step to level out, but if she did, she would fall into the hole. Sam saw the fear in Tink’s face, saw the hole growing and hissing, the yellow sand falling into the black, and before he had time to think what it all meant, he changed direction and yanked hard on Tink’s hand. They fell away from the maw opening in the ground. They pirouetted on tiptoes, dervishes of dust spinning around them, all waltzing out of control. Sam hit the hard ground with a grunt. He landed flat on his back. Air was knocked out of his lungs. A second later Tink’s knee collided with his crotch as she fell on top of him.

  She looked at him, their lips nearly grazing, but the hole was still hissing, and she whipped around to face the threat, half-rolling off him. Sam peered down at his toes and saw the chasm eating up the compacted earth as it advanced towards them. The delayed ball-ache began to make itself known, but the pursuing threat overrode the pain. They scrambled away on backsides, feet skidding in the loose sand. The hole kept growing, except now they were outpacing it, putting distance between them and it, until their backs collided with the steel fence surrounding the playground. There was no need for them to hop the barrier and keep retreating, because it was as though the hole realised it wouldn’t catch them. It slowed and then stopped expanding.

  Chests heaving, they sat staring at the gaping pit in the middle of the playground, making sure it was over. It must have grown to over seven-feet wide and undermined the roundabout. The wind had died. Agitated clouds of dusty air transformed into a languidly settling haze. The last thing to ebb was the hissing, fading and fading until it couldn’t be distinguished from the rush of blood pumping through their veins.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ The words were dry and brittle in Sam’s mouth.

  ‘Shhh!’ Tink said, listening.

  Sam felt a vibration under the palm of his hand. He looked down and saw Tink’s hand next to his, their fingers overlapping. The vibration grew. Something was below them, moving beneath the earth, tunnelling. He met her gaze, her eyes wide and lips thin with fear. It must have been something big, huge. Particles of sand danced around their hands, accompanied by a deep rumbling.

  All colour drained from Tink’s face. A car alarm began to wail nearby, and a tile slipped from the roof of one of the rundown houses skirting the dunes. It smashed on the ground.

  Tink wore the look of someone who’d made a terrible mistake, and over the din she shouted, ‘RUN!’