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mean?” he whispers.
    “It means zilch!” says Dad. He glares at the screen. “You could say that about every single kid that’s ever been born.”
    Then there’s Max looking bright-eyed and smart and me dead scruffy as we tell the tale. “And the raven really did lead you?” is Joe’s final question.
    “Aye,” says Max. “It came into Liam’s garden and led us away.”
    Then there’s a few of Dad’s books with mist swirling again, and an adder slithering across them. Then Dad himself, an interview from ages back, from when his books were just starting to sell. He looks really young and fit and bright. “Yes,” he says, “truth and fiction merge into each other. We try to keep them apart, but how can we? We livein a miraculous world, a world that is filled with the most amazing possibilities.”
    Dad grunts and groans and grinds his teeth.
    “Hell’s teeth!” he says.
    He flings a cushion at the TV and he sinks his beer fast.

7
    We do get on national TV
, a little item at the end of the ten o’clock news. We’re in the News of the World next to a report about Michael Jackson’s nose cracking up. The
Sunday Times
links our story to a travel feature about the beauties of Northumbria.
    The attention lasts a week or so, but pretty soon it all starts dying off. Dad’s right, and other stories start taking over. There’s a big drugs raid in Middlesbrough. A couple of Newcastle United players kick each other half to death on the quayside. Thirty asylum seekers jump ship in Blyth. Then the big one: a journalist called Greg Armstrong who grew up in Hexham has been taken hostage in Baghdad. A couple of groups claim to have him. His wife and kids are on TV, pleading for his release. He can’t be traced.
    The police visit farms and cottages for miles around. No answers about the baby. No information. The red-capped hiker’s never found. A new story turns up during the search: the death of Thomas Fell. His body’s found in an ancient cottage in a valley below Cheviot. Must have been there months. It’s almost eaten away to bone. He must have been eighty years old. He was a prisoner of war in World War II who never went home again. He became a wanderer, a tramp, living alone in the northern moors. He lived out in the open in summer, in abandoned cottages when the cold came. He was often seen roaming, dreaming. He was rumored to be a good man, a kind man. But he was silent and elusive, a man who loved his solitude. Not a man for making friends or having family. Kept himself to himself, never lost his thick Bavarian accent. Left behind a sheaf of poems in German, a box full of treasures dug out from the earth: arrowheads, coins, stone knives from right back in the Stone Age. The story’s told, then fades away, like all the stories in the news.

8
    The days heat up.
There’s restrictions on water use. The brook slows to a trickle. The river sinks. Max and I play football in the garden, climb trees, wander through the lanes. We camp out every night in the garden in the breathless nights. I polish the knife, I sharpen it, I soften its sheath. I dream about it resting snug in my hand. We talk about the baby. I spin yarns about her: she’s a fairy baby and the money’s fairy gold; she’s come through some kind of time warp from the time of the border raids; she’s the child of some barmy farmer and a witch.
    We play with the kids on the field beside the school. The kids keep on laughing at us for how stupid we looked on telly, but they want to know the story again and again. Did you really not nick some of the money? they say. You must be stupid, they say.
    One day Gordon Nattrass gets on about Greg Armstrong.
    “Me dad was at school with him,” he says. “Says he was a right snobby ponce. He was probably poking and prying where he shouldn’t’ve been. We’re not weeping no tears for him. What was he doing there anyway?”
    “What do you mean, What was he doing there?” I say.
    “I mean what I say,