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thunderclaps day and night, when the boats are in a tug of war with the chains that bind the city together against an ocean that’s set on tearing it apart?
    ‘In the name of The Man, Ma, gimme peace .’
    Wheeez.
    ‘Go back to sleep,’ he mutters. ‘I’ll go find some work.’
    Tuck clambers back on to the shack roof. His ankle’sstill sore, but he tries a leap and lands, light as a cat, on one foot, on the roof next door.
    But Ma’s still going. He’s a disgrace, she’s yelling, always away out leaving his poor mother to fend for herself. One day he’ll come back and she’ll have died, she will, in a corner, all alone.
    But the wind’s against her. Soon she’ll be right out of his ears.

THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE

    Without a dodgy ankle, it’s easy to leap and scuddy across the boat shacks. They’re crammed close with rubbery roofs, good for foot-grip, made from tarred strips of sea-scavenged tyres. Today, Tuck tries to leap and land on his good foot. Eyes of The Man, who cares about a foot? He’s alive! He might’ve been gutted like a fish by a Salter and ditched in the sea last night.
    Pomperoy is the shape of a flat fish. The Grimby Gray is one of the wrecked, rusty barges crammed with shacks at the city’s tail end. The lagoon around the oil rig in the middle, where Tuck is headed, is its pumping heart.
    At the edge of The Grimby Gray , Tuck hops across the wire suspension bridge (built by his own Da and branded with the Culpy crescent) that connects to the neighbouring barge. He clears that, and the next. Now he’s in the huge region of Doycha, a motley maze of small boats. It’s said that Doycha has a thousand bridgeways, but Tuck knows there are exactly eight hundred and forty-one.
    He leaps from boat to boat, laughing whenever he earns a yell. Every so often his ankle throbs too hard and he sits down on a roof or hobbles on to a swaying bridgefor a rest, but cuts back to scuddying across the boats as soon as he can. They give him a straighter route than the bridgeways that link the boats. Though he could map a track across the bridgeways blind.
    Beyond Doycha, he zigzags a route along the bridges that run between the rusted hulks of the ferries and take him into the higgledy squalor of Yewki. At last, he reaches the wooden walkways that surround the central lagoon. In the middle of the lagoon is the huge oil rig, the city’s anchor and fuel source, linked by the five suspension bridges that radiate from it like the spokes of a great wheel.
    All around the lagoon the market gondolas are being loaded up. By the time the sky has lightened the lagoon will be thronged with gondolas, each one piled with a harvest from the ocean or the sky: seafood and scrap metal, plastic and driftwood, birds and eggs. Tuck is overtired and achy. The buzz of the market workers irritates like a swarm of flies round his head. Creeping round the empty city after curfew is what he loves. Especially the lagoon.
    Sometimes, deep in the night, strange winds whirl around the boat masts and upset the lagoon with scents of somewhere else. They fill Tuck with curiosity and send prickles down his spine. The restless ruffles inside him only calm when the wind flies off across the ocean and the lagoon smoothes to black glass.
    Tuck knows about glass. He even owns a bit. It belonged to Grumpa. The fragment of glass is the shape of a raggedy, three-cornered boat sail and just fits into the creases of his closed hand. Once sharp enough to cut him, Tuck has rubbed the jagged edges smooth by scraping the Culpy crescent, his Da’s trademark, into the wooden walkways around the lagoon. The power of the glass isthat it can show you your very own self. And, better still, if you catch the sun’s rays inside it, you can train it to make fire.
    It’s a mirror , Grumpa told him. My old mum called it a looking-glass. Everyone used to have them, some big as your face, even as big as your whole self. First thing you’d do in the morning was take a