Here in Bristol you don’t get much frost. The sea gets channelled up the Bristol Channel and keeps us all moist and cool. But these past couple of days it’s been really cold. Yesterday there were tiny little frost crystals on all the walls and the twigs and branches. There’s a lot of trees in this town. Today there was another frost and all yesterday’s crystals had more crystals growing up them, like fairy land. Ice flowers everywhere you look. I went out as soon as I realised. I stood looking for hours.

Me and Rob and Sal went out and made a slide down Richmond Road. It was already so slippery we had trouble walking up it. Once we got to the top, you could sit on a piece of cardboard and slide for miles down into the square at the bottom. We were at it all morning. We got Gemma out, and Col. Even Lily came out in the end. We forgot everything. Then this old black guy went past and started on at us for making the pathway dangerous and Lily lost her temper as usual.

‘Son of the morgue! Sod off and die!’ she yelled at the poor old bloke. Lily really knows how to turn a good insult.

Dealing’s okay, it’s a business. You go round and visit your friends, buy a little, sell a little, take a little. We usually have enough money left over to get food and stuff, so we don’t have to do so much shoplifting. That’s nice, because although it’s fun, it wears you down if you have to do it every day. Rob’s sixteen, he can sign on. Lily’ll be sixteen in a few months but meanwhile we only get what we make ourselves.

I really got into the shoplifting for a while. I got Gemma to sew these big pockets into my coat so I could really stuff myself with things.

I used to walk into the supermarket thin and walk out again fat. I even used to try and keep up with Rob, which was dangerous, really, because he’s in another class.

Rob’s been at it since he was a kid. He used to train for it. He grew up in tepees and trailers and lorries. He’d get up in the night and go into someone’s tepee, and then he’d crawl round inside, hiding behind the chairs and the table and dashing out across the open spaces while they weren’t looking. Can you imagine?

‘Practising,’ he says. For shoplifting, see? And he never got caught either.

I remember those nights out in the garden by the fire. They really were the summer for me. Big bonfires – we kept them going all night. Whenever it got low someone’d toddle out and find some wood in a skip. There was the swing. Did you hear about that swing? Rob and I built it up in the big sycamore tree at the end of the garden. Huge great tree, its roots were breaking up the wall on the other side, tearing out stones and rubble…

Anyway, we climbed up and cut off the branches to fit this swing in. We had to fight Lily about it, she went mad, she said we were mutilating her tree. She went on and on about it, but when we’d finished it, she loved it. It was one great long piece of rope, must have been five yards long, with a cross-piece of wood at the bottom. You had to go right back to the other end of the garden pulling the rope after you, right up on top of the little shed… then you let go…

It was amazing! Not just how long it was, but because you went right out beyond the garden and over the road. People’d be walking along or driving or on their bikes and they’d hear this whoosh of air overhead like some giant eagle or something was coming down. And there’d be someone flying out above their heads! We used to do it with no clothes on. Stark naked. People used to almost crash their cars. It was such a gas. You can imagine – you’re driving along and then suddenly this naked girl appears howling and flying through the air.

We were all in love with one another. We were in love with ourselves. We still are. And me and Gemma of course.

When she took me back in I was so happy. I was just so happy. I really felt like I’d arrived, I belonged. We were just all over each other. I was nervous at first that she’d want a bit more freedom in the next few days, but it wasn’t like that at all. She’d really missed me. She didn’t realise until I’d gone. She wanted me so much. And then when I came back, she was in love with me as much as I was in love with her. It was a miracle. In the summer we’d sit next to one another for hours and hours, by the fire holding hands, and I was so grateful and happy that it had worked out.

I still love her, but it’s different now. I don’t need her any more, you know. If she chucked me now, I’d still be really upset, but I know that I’d get on with my life. Back then, it felt like the end of the world.

Maybe that’s the difference with me these days. I used to get this feeling that life was rushing past me and I had to grab hold of it or I’d lose everything. But when I moved here, I remember thinking, I’m in control now. It was the first time I felt I had my life in my own hands. There I was scrabbling and struggling to keep things together. These days, I just let go of them. And it isn’t me who falls. It’s the rest of the world that goes away – up or down, I don’t know. Just away.

The trouble with the dealing is, there’s always drugs about so you tend always to take them. But I’m glad we don’t have to do so much thieving. We had a couple of close calls, actually. There was this one time we ran out of booze, so Rob and Col decided to go and do an off licence. I went along, I don’t know why. They’d done it before but this sort of thing was brand new to me.

We got to the place. Rob whips out this brick – and crash, straight through the window. Then the alarm; it crashed about, it was terrible. I thought the whole world would be on top of us. We all dived in. I was a bit slow, I’m always a bit slow. I was too busy watching up and down the street but the other two dived in and grabbed bottles as fast as they could. But it was a good job I was a bit slow, because then I saw a cop coming. This cop was haring up the road, he must have been just round the corner. I yelled, ‘Pigs!’ and everyone charged out and up the road, dropping cans of beer and smashing bottles of wine.

We made it to a railway cutting, up the side and into the trees. The policeman waited at the top of the ridge. We heard the police cars wailing up the road, screeching to a halt. Then it was a manhunt!

They roadblocked the two sides of the cutting. They had men up and down the side. I mean, fifty quid’s worth of booze and they had this operation that must have cost thousands. If they’d given me half that money, I’d never commit another crime for months. They even had a loudspeaker.

‘We know you’re in there… come on out, lads, and we’ll see what we can do for you.’

Yeah, sure.

We were hiding in the shrubbery, giggling. Actually, I got a bit panicky at one point and I thought we’d better give ourselves up. You know how they go on: It’ll be better for you, the magistrate will think better of you if you do this, we’re going to get the dogs now…

But Col and Rob knew better. They’d been up to this sort of thing all their lives. We just sat tight. After a bit the pigs got bored, or they decided we’d legged it. So they went. And after they went, we went too.

I was scared shitless, actually, but it was fun looking back on it. We don’t do that sort of thing these days. It’s too risky. If they came to our homes, it’d be serious. Apart from the fact that I do a little dealing, it would really do Lily in. She’s in a bit of a mess, if you ask me, although no one says anything about it.

I dunno, perhaps she knows what she’s doing. Sometimes I do really honestly think she has special powers. She thinks she does. You know that book they got me? We’ve still got it. I keep it in a drawer. In the drawer there’s a cutlery box we found in a skip, an old one made of wood with a silk lining. Inside there’s this piece of silk, a scarf or something. It’s really old. We found that in a skip too. It’s wonderful. It might be seventy or even a hundred years old or more. Someone wore it when they were young and beautiful in the nineteen twenties or further back. Then they’d got old and kept it tucked away because it was full of memories. Then they’d died and the people who came after threw it out.

But we found it, so it isn’t wasted. And wrapped in the silk is the book. Lily calls it the Sky Bible because of that remark I made when I first saw it. Rob kept repeating it. ‘It must be like owning the sky.’

Lily lights incense sticks and candles, and fills the room with smoke and candlelight. Then she takes the book out very slowly, very carefully.

‘Sky Bible, what we gonna do today?’

And she lets the book fall open. Last time it was a piccy of a naked woman. Not young, quite old and baggy. She was sitting on an armchair smoking a cigarette and looking out of the window. All the smoke was coiling around the place. She wasn’t pretty or anything but the photograph was really beautiful. I thought so anyway.

‘What’s it mean, Lily?’ asked Gemma.

Rob said, ‘Have sex in an armchair?’ He’s a bit irreverent about it, it annoys Lily.

Lily screws up her eyes and thinks carefully. Then she says, ‘Nah. It says, we gotta do some heroin today…’

Everyone fell about laughing. But she really meant it, she got quite annoyed.

‘Strange, that’s what it said last time,’ I said.

Lily patted it. ‘The Sky Bible knows how to have a good time,’ she intoned.

I could never work out if it’s a game or not. But I think if anyone’s magic, Lily is. It’s funny – sometimes she’s dead against any sort of hocus pocus, other times she acts like she’s the Queen Witch. You never know what’s going on with Lily. She worries me sometimes. She thinks that whatever she happens to be thinking is fantastic. And the problem with Gemma is, she thinks whatever Lily is thinking is fantastic.

I tried to talk about it to Gemma the other day, but she just got annoyed. She thought I was getting scared, told me I ought to lay off the junk. I’m not worried about it for myself, I never take smack two days on the trot, just to show myself. But I do worry about Gemma. I can take it or leave it, but she never says no.

It’s one of the problems that we all do the same kind of thing. There’s always one of us wants a chase. Of course we never use needles, we’ve got more sense than that… but I might want to have a break but Gemma’ll feel like she wants some. Or if both me and her decide to have a break, Lily’ll turn up or Rob will or Sally…

You sort of infect one another like that.

It’ll be all right. I just have to remember I got away from my mum and dad. If I can escape from that, I can escape from anything.