Gribble's Incomplete Field Guide to Human Interaction

Entry written at 3 a.m., off shift, by the light of a radiator that has just clicked off. Nobody ever asks what the pilot does when the ship's asleep. The answer is: he has a cup of tea, in the cold, on his own, and thinks about things he would rather not think about. This is not in the job description. There is no job description. That, frankly, is the whole trouble.

At three o'clock in the morning, when Rae was fast asleep and the house was dark and ticking, Gribble climbed out through the little fold by her ear, lowered himself down the side of the duvet hand over hand, and dropped onto the cold floorboards to have his tea.

It was the only part of the day that was his.

He padded across the floor on his bare clawed feet, hissing every time one of them touched a particularly cold board, and climbed up onto the radiator under the window. The radiator had clicked off hours ago. It always clicked off at ten. He had complained about this, bitterly, for eleven years, to nobody, because the people who controlled the radiator, the great unseen authorities who ran the house and turned the heating down to the very minute to save their pennies, did not know he existed and would not have listened if they had.

"Blooming heating," he muttered, settling his small bones against the very last of the warmth left in the metal. "Off at ten. In this weather. They'll be sorry when the pipes freeze. Oh, they'll be sorry then. But will they put it back on for a working creature at three in the morning? They will not."

He unscrewed the lid of his thermos, which was a thimble he had found down the side of the sofa in 2019 and never given back, and poured himself a cup of tea about the size of a raindrop. He held it in both knobbly hands and breathed the steam and, for a moment, said nothing at all.

This was the bit he never told anyone about. Not that there was anyone to tell. The sitting. The tea going cold too fast in the cold air. The big dark window with the streetlight orange behind the curtains, and the whole sleeping street out there, every house with its heating off and, although he did not know it yet, its own tired pilot sitting up in the dark. He still thought it was only him.

He drank his tea. He rubbed his hands. He thought, as he often did at this hour, about how nice it would be to have a pair of slippers. He had wanted slippers for eleven years. He had never once worked out how to get any.

Then the radiator went properly cold, the way they do, and he sighed, and screwed the thimble shut, and climbed down to get on with the last hour before the morning shift, because the morning shift did not start itself, and nobody else was going to start it for him.

He had no way of knowing that this particular morning, for the first time in eleven years, the ship was going to wake up early.

Entry 1: Mornings. The pilot will be suited and at the controls by 06:55 hours, before the ship wakes. The ship must never find out there is a cockpit. The ship must never find out there is a pilot. Above all, the ship must NEVER, under any circumstances whatsoever, catch the pilot having a wee.

Rae woke up wrong.

Her left arm lay on the duvet like it belonged to someone else and had just been dumped there. Her jaw felt borrowed. When she told her foot to wiggle, there was a wait, like the message had a long way to travel and got there tired.

It was too early. The light was still grey and her alarm hadn't gone off. The whole house was quiet in a way that felt like a classroom when the teacher has nipped out: the same room, but with the person in charge of it missing.

And the wrong feeling was a new one. Not the usual just-woke-up feeling. This was emptier. Like a fairground ride with nobody in the little booth.

She turned her head on the pillow, slowly, because nothing was helping her turn it. And there, on her bedside table, next to her glass of water and the clock blinking its too-early numbers, was the goblin.

He had his back to her. He was standing right on the edge of the table, up on his toes, having a wee off the side into the bin, with the calm, faraway face of someone who has done exactly this every single morning of his life and never once been caught.

Rae lay very still.

He was about as tall as a teacup. He was wiry and knobbly, like a bundle of twigs wrapped in soft leathery skin, and his hands and feet were way too big for the rest of him. His skin was grey-green, with little ash-coloured freckles, and he was smudged all over, like he'd been leaning on something dirty. Tufts of rust-brown hair stuck up off his head like he'd been rubbed with a balloon. He wore a patched-up flight suit covered in oil stains, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and a pair of goggles shoved up on his forehead. One goggle lens was cracked. The other was fogged up so you couldn't see through it at all. He had no shoes. His toes had little claws on the end, hooked over the table edge to keep him steady.

On the back of the flight suit, stitched on crooked in thread that used to be white, was one word: GRIBBLE.

He finished. He gave a little shake. Then, before he climbed back to wherever he'd come from, he stopped, frowned at the row of felt-tips on her bedside table, and nudged the one that was sticking out until it lined up with the others. Only then did he turn round.

His eyes met Rae's.

His eyes were amber-gold and bulgy, and they never quite kept still.

Nobody moved.

The goblin's face did about four things really fast, like a fruit machine going through its lights. Surprise. Then he knew her. Then pure horror. His edges started to flicker, like a telly with the aerial knocked, and he grabbed at his half-done-up suit, and he showed all his little pointy teeth, not because he wanted to bite her, but the way you'd shout if someone walked in on you on the loo.

Then he spoke. The voice didn't come through her ears. It came up through the inside of her head, all gravelly and bunged-up and completely sure of itself.

"YOU ARE NOT MEANT TO BE AWAKE," he said. Like it was her fault. Like she'd been rude.

Rae pushed herself up on one elbow. Slowly, because her body still wasn't really answering her. "What are you?" she whispered.

"Nothing," said the goblin, fast. "I'm nothing. You're dreaming. This is a dream. Go back to sleep and in the morning you won't remember a scrap of it." He started edging towards the corner of the table.

"I'm not dreaming. I can feel the cold bit of the pillow."

"That," he said, "is exactly the sort of thing you feel in a dream. Famous for it, dreams are. Cold pillows. Now. Off you pop."

"How did you get on my table?"

"Climbed."

"From where?"

He stopped edging. His ears went flat. "That," he said, "is classified."

Rae looked at him. He looked back, daring her to ask again. So she asked again.

"Classified from who? It's my table."

"It is NOT your table," he snapped, and then looked like he wished he hadn't said it. "It is. It's your table. Forget I said that. Look, I haven't got time for this. I've a shift starting at seven, and there's a great deal to set up before seven, not that anybody ever thinks about the setting-up. Oh no."

"A shift doing what?"

"Never you mind."

"A shift where?"

He didn't answer. He folded his big arms and stared very hard at the wall. While he stared, his free hand crept up, all on its own, and started tugging at one of his pointed ears, pulling it down and letting it spring back, down and back, down and back.

Rae lay there and thought about it. She thought about the empty feeling when she woke up. The way her foot had taken ages to move, like the message had a long way to go. She wiggled her fingers, just to check.

They wiggled. But a tiny bit late. Like a video where the sound doesn't quite line up with the picture.

The goblin's eyes flicked to her hand. Just for a second. Then back to the wall. But she'd seen him. He'd watched her fingers move like a man checking his own work.

"You felt that," said Rae slowly. "When I moved my fingers. You felt it."

"I did not."

"You looked."

"I look at lots of things. I'm a very alert creature. It's my job."

"Your job." She was close to something now. She could feel it, the way you can feel the shape of a word that's stuck on the end of your tongue. "Your shift. The setting-up. You keep saying job."

She looked at the little fold in the air by the edge of the table. A gap, shaped like a missing jigsaw piece. She'd felt that exact gap somewhere in the middle of herself for as long as she could remember.

"You climbed out of there," she said. "Out of me."

The goblin said nothing. Which was the loudest thing he'd said yet.

"You live behind my eyes," said Rae. "And when you're in there, you… what? You drive me?"

He turned round, slowly, and looked at her. His face did a complicated thing, like he was working out whether it was worth carrying on with the lying when the lying so obviously wasn't working. And then the fight went out of him. His shoulders dropped.

"Somebody has to," he said.

"Drive me."

"Pilot you," he corrected, stiff about it, because if he was going to admit the thing then he was at least going to use the proper word for it. "You're the ship. I'm the pilot. That's the arrangement. It's always been the arrangement, since before you could walk, and it has worked perfectly well, thank you very much, right up until twenty to six this morning."

And then, because the wall was down now and moaning was the only language he was really any good at, the whole lot came out in a rush.

"Eleven years. Eleven years I've been in there. On my own. In the heat. Working this body for you, every single minute, while you sat in the back not knowing the first thing about it. Two legs to keep upright. A face to keep arranged. A voice to keep at the right volume, which is a nightmare, by the way, the number of settings on that voice. I built that whole control panel myself, out of bits, out of whatever I could find down the back of things, because nobody ever gave me the proper kit and nobody ever gave me the rest of the instructions. I've run the entire job off half a manual and a lot of guessing. And not once, not one single time, in eleven whole years, has anybody said so much as ta."

He ran out of breath. His little chest was going in and out fast, like a bird's.

Rae looked at him. This cross, knobbly, worn-out little thing, standing on her bedside table being so completely sure he was important, while behind him, through her bedroom window, the sky was getting big and pale and the world was waking up: cars, and a dog, and somebody's bin lorry, the whole enormous noisy day getting ready to come at them. He looked very small in front of it. She didn't feel scared. She felt the other thing. The thing you feel when someone is being grumpy at you because being grumpy is easier than the crying sort of thing.

"Thank you," she said.

The goblin's mouth was open, ready for the next moan. It stayed open. His ears stopped swivelling. Something went across his face, there and gone, fast, like a cloud across the playground on a windy day. Then he covered it up by looking even more insulted than before.

"Don't," he said. "Don't you start. I don't want feeling sorry for. I've managed for eleven years and I'll manage for eleven more, and I'll thank you not to look at me like that. Now. I'm going back to work. You're going back to sleep. And we are never mentioning this again."

He stomped back to the little fold in the air at the edge of the table. The pilot's door. He climbed in like a tired man getting into a cold car on a rainy morning, grumbling the whole way, and pulled it shut behind him.

And the body switched back on.

Her foot moved straight away. Her jaw was hers again. The empty feeling was gone. In its place was the normal background hum she'd had her whole life and never once noticed. The hum, she understood now, of someone being at the controls.

She did not go back to sleep.

Entry 2: Breakfast and the Operating of a Body in Front of Family Members. Breakfast is the most dangerous meal of the day, because it requires the body to do two things at once: eat, and talk. The pilot is reminded that the body has only one mouth, and that it cannot be used for both at the same time, no matter how many times the man at the head of the table attempts it.

By half past seven, Rae was sitting at the kitchen table, and she was watching everything Gribble did, which was new, and which Gribble hated.

"Stop that," he said. "Stop watching. I can't work with somebody watching. Do footballers have the crowd standing in the goal with them? They do not."

I just want to see how it works, Rae thought.

"It works," said Gribble, "because I make it work. Now. Cereal. This is a delicate operation and I'd appreciate quiet."

Rae's dad was at the other end of the table with his toast and the radio on low. "Sleep alright, love?" he said.

And Gribble, who now had to pour the cereal AND keep the face friendly AND get a word ready for her dad, all at the same time, began to sweat.

He wiped his brow with the oily rag. He set his feet. He took the lever marked HAND-EYE CO-ORDINATION in his right hand, two-handed grip, the way you'd take a thing that might kick. He eased it forward a notch. Rae's hand closed round the cereal box. He eased it another notch. The box tilted. Cereal went into the bowl, more or less, and he let out a breath, and reached his left hand across for the dial marked SMALL TALK, because her dad was building up to say something, you could always tell, and you had to have a word loaded and ready before they finished or you were sunk. He got one hand on the lever and one hand on the dial and held them both, sweating, the way you'd hold two dogs that didn't like each other. Then her dad said, "Big day?" which was a second question, an unscheduled question, and in the scramble to get a word ready Gribble pulled down on the wrong thing entirely.

Rae watched her own hand pick up the orange juice and pour it, carefully, steadily, all over her cereal.

There was a small pause.

Down in the cockpit, Gribble stared at what had happened. His ear-tug started up. Then, because there was a grown-up watching and a disaster on the table and no time to think, he lunged sideways and slammed his whole hand onto a big square button Rae hadn't noticed before, a button worn shiny from use, labelled ACT LIKE YOU MEANT TO DO THAT.

Rae picked up her spoon. She had a mouthful of orange-juice cereal. She looked at her dad.

"Zesty," she said.

Her dad blinked. "Right," he said. "Good. That's. Yeah."

Under the table, without Rae deciding to, her knee had started bouncing. Up and down, up and down, fast. She put her hand on it. It carried on anyway. That was the leak, she was starting to realise. When Gribble panicked down in the dark, it came up the cables and out the edges of her, in little ways she'd never been able to stop.

She ate three more spoonfuls of zesty cereal so her dad wouldn't think anything was wrong. She did not enjoy them.

Then her dad put down his toast, got the particular happy look he got, and said: "Here. Why did the scarecrow win an award?"

Down in the cockpit, every alarm went amber. Gribble flung the manual open.

"A joke," he muttered, flicking pages, ear-tugging hard now. "He's doing a joke. There's a thing you do after a joke. Where is it. Laughing, polite. Laughing, polite. We have Laughing, Genuine, and we have Laughing, Nervous, and we have a whole chapter on Crying, but Laughing, Polite, Pity, For The Use Of Fathers is missing, the page is GONE, who took the page." He was pulling levers now more or less at random, the way you press all the buttons on a broken telly remote. "Something. Give him something. Anything that sounds like a laugh."

"Because he was outstanding in his field," said her dad, and beamed.

And Gribble, with no page and no time, grabbed the nearest laugh-shaped lever he could reach, which was a long black one right at the back, under a layer of dust, marked MANIACAL VILLAIN LAUGH (DO NOT), and hauled.

Rae threw back her head and let out a booming, echoing, evil cackle. It rolled around the kitchen. It rattled the spice rack. It was the laugh of someone who has tied a train driver to the tracks and is enjoying it.

The radio seemed to go quiet.

Her dad looked at her for a long moment. "…You alright, love?"

"Mm," said Rae, and stood up, and got her bag, fast.

"Combat retreat," Gribble agreed, with great relief. "Combat retreat. Good. Out. Out out out."

On the way past the front door her dad called, "Have a good one. Keep your eyes peeled."

Down in the cockpit there was a short, baffled silence.

"Peeled," said Gribble. "Why would we. With what. Where does he keep the peeler. Rae, does your father own a special eye peeler, because if so I need to know about it for the manual, I cannot be expected to plan for this sort of thing if nobody tells me about the equipment."

It means be careful, Rae thought, pulling the door shut behind her. It just means be careful.

"Then why," said Gribble bitterly, "didn't he say be careful."

It was, Rae thought, a fair question.

Entry 3: The Phrase "How Are You". This is not a question. It looks like a question. It is a trap shaped like a question. Approved replies: "Good thanks." "Fine, ta." "Not bad." Forbidden reply: how we actually are. (There is no protocol for how we actually are. There has never been room.)

The walk to school was downhill and took eleven minutes, and Gribble had something to say about every single one of them.

"Not so fast," he snapped. "You'll have us over. Do you know how hard it is to keep a thing this shape standing up? Two legs. TWO. Whose idea was that. Mind the kerb. MIND THE KERB. There. See. No thanks to you."

The trouble came at the crossing, because at the crossing was the lollipop lady, and the lollipop lady, in Gribble's expert opinion, was a catastrophe in a high-visibility coat.

"Stop," he ordered, and Rae's feet planted themselves three steps from the kerb. "She's a talker. I can tell. She's got the look. And you never trust anyone in a hi-vis, that's a rule, that's the authorities, that is, they put them in the coats so you'll do what they say. When she talks, you say nothing clever. Nothing clever. Clever gets us into a conversation, and a conversation is a swamp."

The lollipop lady stepped into the road, held up her big round sign, and smiled the way she smiled at everyone. "Morning, love! How are you?"

Everything stopped.

Inside Rae's head, every warning light came on at once. Since they were all on already, this mostly meant Gribble made a noise like someone sitting down hard on a bucket of pickles.

"How are you," he repeated, hollow. "There it is. The trap. Manual. Where is the manual. Check under the emergency pancake protocols."

He yanked out the binder. It was fat and water-stained and held shut with a bulldog clip the size of a mousetrap. On the front, gone over loads of times in biro to make it look official, it said: HUMAN INTERACTIONS: A FIELD GUIDE (INCOMPLETE).

A red clock on the cockpit wall wasn't telling the time. It was counting, in big red numbers, how long since the lollipop lady had spoken.

"WE HAVE BEEN QUIET FOR ONE AND A HALF SECONDS," Gribble said. "That is a chasm. That is the Grand Canyon. SAY SOMETHING."

"Good thanks you," said Rae.

It came out as one word. Goodthanksyou. No gaps in it. And way too loud, because Gribble had thrown himself at the dial marked VOICE: VOLUME and overdone it. It came out at the volume you'd use to warn a village about a flood.

The lollipop lady blinked, then did the thing grown-ups do where they pretend that was completely normal. "Aw, good. Off you go then, mind the puddle."

Rae crossed the road, and on the other side she stopped and tightened the strap on her backpack, even though it didn't need tightening, just to have something ordinary to do with her hands.

"This time," said Gribble darkly. "You're welcome, by the way. Not that I expect to hear it."

The corridor was where Chapter Four let them down.

Chapter Four of the manual was Greetings, On The Move, and it was Gribble's pride and joy, because he'd worked it all out himself over many years, and it had one main move in it, and the main move was the NOD AND SMILE lever. He had complete faith in the Nod and Smile lever. He believed it could get them down any corridor in the world.

A girl from Rae's class waved. "Nod and Smile," said Gribble calmly, and pulled it, and Rae nodded and smiled, and it was fine.

A teacher going the other way said, "Morning." "Nod and Smile," said Gribble, pulling it again, smooth as anything, and Rae nodded and smiled, and that was fine too.

"You see," said Gribble, pleased with himself, settling back. "Chapter Four. Never lets us down. People think being a pilot is all panic. It is not. It is preparation. It is having the right lever for the…"

And then Dylan Pryce stepped sideways out of nowhere and stood right in front of Rae, so she had to stop, and looked her up and down, and said, loudly, so his mates could hear, "Nice shoes. Did you get them free with a cereal box?"

The cockpit went dead quiet.

"…That's not a greeting," said Gribble.

No, thought Rae. Her knee had started bouncing. She looked at the floor.

"That's an insult. That's a completely different chapter. The cheek of it. The absolute cheek. Little git. Where's the chapter on insults." He was flipping pages now, fast, fast, the ear-tug going like mad. "Comebacks. Comebacks. We need a comeback, a good one, something that puts him in his place and makes everyone respect us forever, it'll be here, it has to be here, it…"

The chapter on insults was not there. Like the polite-laugh page, like so many pages, it had never been written, because nobody had ever given Gribble the rest of the manual, and you cannot write the chapter on the worst moments when you are too busy living through them.

Dylan was waiting. His mates were waiting. The red clock was climbing.

And Gribble, cornered, with no page and no comeback and a whole corridor watching, did the only thing he had ever properly trusted. He reached for Chapter Four. He grabbed the NOD AND SMILE lever with both hands, and he yanked it as hard as it would go.

Rae gave Dylan Pryce an enormous, beaming, double-thumbs-up.

She held it. Both thumbs. A huge, warm, delighted smile, like he'd just handed her the best news of her life.

Dylan's face fell apart. The clever look slid right off it. He glanced at his mates, who had stopped laughing and were now staring at Rae with the wary expression of people who have poked a thing and got a noise they don't understand. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. Then he muttered, "…whatever, weirdo," and went, fast, taking his mates with him, looking back twice.

Rae walked on. After a few steps she crouched to do up a shoelace that was already done up.

Down in the cockpit, Gribble was breathing hard, staring at the Nod and Smile lever in his hands as if it had saved his life, which, in a way, it had.

"…I have no idea what just happened," he admitted.

Me neither, thought Rae. But Dylan Pryce did not say one word to her for the rest of the term, and gave her, when they passed in corridors, a small, frightened nod, and that was fine by either of them.

Entry 4: Numbers. Sums are to be treated as live threats until proven otherwise. The pilot has learned the hard way that a question reading "two trains are travelling towards each other" is not, whatever the teacher insists, "just maths".

In the third lesson there was a maths test, and the second question on the maths test said: Two trains are travelling towards each other. One is going at 60 miles per hour and the other is going at 50 miles per hour.

Down in the cockpit, Gribble read it over Rae's shoulder, and went white.

"Two trains," he said. "Travelling towards each other. Rae. Two trains are coming towards us. At a combined speed of one hundred and ten miles an hour. In a classroom."

It's a maths problem, Rae thought. Nobody's actually…

"There's no page for trains," said Gribble, and his voice had gone very high. "There's no page for being hit by a train. CLASS-FOUR IMPACT EVENT. BRACE. BRACE. BRACE FOR IMPACT."

He hit the button.

Rae slid straight off her chair and got under her desk, arms over her head, in the crash position, the way you would if a train were genuinely coming.

The classroom was very quiet.

She stayed there for a second. Then, with the whole class looking, and her teacher coming over with an expression of enormous patience, she understood that no train was coming, and that there had never been a train, and that there was now a different and slower kind of disaster, which was having to climb back out from under the desk.

"Dropped my rubber, Miss," she said, from the floor.

"Right," said Miss. "Found it?"

"Yes, Miss."

She got back into her chair. Her face was hot. Her knee was going.

Down in the cockpit, Gribble was sat in a tiny pilot's chair he'd strapped himself into, breathing into a paper bag.

"…When you write the manual," he said weakly, "and you will have to write the manual one day, I shan't be doing it forever, you put in big letters, on the first page: THE TRAINS ARE NOT REAL. Because nobody told me. Nobody ever tells me anything."

Rae wrote 5 miles in the answer box, which was wrong, and got on with the test, and her knee did not stop bouncing for the rest of the lesson.

Just before lunch, the whole school filed into the hall for assembly, and that was when Rae did the bravest thing she had done all day.

Gribble was in a state. The maths test had finished him off. He was still jumpy from the train that wasn't a train, flinching at every cough and chair-scrape, and she could feel it leaking out of her, the knee, the collar, her eyes skating about and never settling on anything. And she knew, the way you know these things, that a hall full of the whole school singing was going to be the worst place in the world for him. The echo. The crowd. All that noise with nowhere to put it.

So while the class was still at their desks, getting ready to line up, she made a decision.

You're not coming, she thought. To assembly. You're staying here. In the classroom, where it's quiet. You're going to have a rest, and I'm going to do the assembly on my own.

There was a horrified silence in the cockpit.

"You can't fly solo," said Gribble. "You've never flown solo. You don't know where anything is. What if somebody talks to us. What if there's a train."

There won't be a train.

"There is always the chance of a train."

Gribble. She made her thinking-voice as steady as she could. You're worn out. You've been at those controls for eleven years and you've never had one single break. I'm asking for twenty minutes. I'll be just down the corridor, and if it goes wrong I'll come straight back and get you. But I don't think it's going to go wrong. I think I can sit in a hall. I think that might be exactly the sort of thing I can do.

He didn't answer for a moment. And then, because he was so tired, and because some small buried part of him had been waiting eleven years for somebody to say that to him, he let go of the controls.

The body went empty. Rae felt it happen, that fairground-with-nobody-in-the-booth feeling, her own arms going far away and heavy. Then, carefully, the way you pick up something you're not sure you're allowed to touch, she reached for the controls herself, from right at the back where she'd always sat, and took hold.

The body steadied. Not smoothly. Not the way Gribble did it. But it steadied.

She opened the little fold by her ear and Gribble climbed out into her cupped hand, blinking, suddenly tiny and bare in the bright classroom air. She lowered him into her open pencil case in the desk tray, down among the highlighters, and propped the lid so he could see out.

He stood there. He looked round at the giant pencils, and the vast pink rubber, and the great grey ceiling miles above. Then, because he had to do something with his hands, he started straightening the highlighters into a neat row by colour.

"This is a terrible idea," he said, lining up the green one.

"Two minutes," whispered Rae. "I'll be quick. Just stay in the pencil case. Don't go anywhere."

"Rae," said the boy at the next desk, "who are you talking to?"

"Nobody," said Rae, and got up, and joined the line.

And then she walked herself out of the classroom and down the corridor to the hall, on her own controls, for the very first time.

It was slow. She had to think about all of it, every bit, the way you think about every single word in a language you've only just started. Left foot. Right foot. Mind the door frame. She concentrated so hard her tongue stuck out a little. But she did it. She got herself down the corridor and into the hall and sat herself down on the cold floor in her class's row, in one piece, and nobody looked at her twice.

And then she noticed the quiet.

Not the hall. The hall was deafening, the whole school and a piano and Mrs Bevan asking everyone to find a space. The quiet was inside. Behind her eyes, where there was always shouting and always alarms and always Gribble, there was now just room. Still, warm, empty room. She could hear herself think. She had never once, in her whole life, just been able to hear herself think.

She sat in it like a warm bath.

Gribble, she thought, after a while. You alright back there?

His voice came from all the way down the corridor, from the pencil case, faint but perfectly clear, the way it had been clear from the bedside table that first morning. The link between them, it turned out, didn't care how far apart they were.

"Fine," he said, far too quickly. "Absolutely fine. Standing guard. Holding the position. You enjoy your little sit-down." A pause. "What's happening. Is something happening. Why's it so quiet where you are, that's not right, quiet means they're about to ask you a question."

It's just assembly, Rae thought. Nobody's going to ask me anything. Rest.

"Pilots don't rest," he said. But he sounded less sure of it than usual.

For a few minutes he managed it. Then a little spike of panic came down the line.

"Somebody's come back into the classroom," he hissed. "A teacher. For the register, I think. She's coming this way. She's coming towards the desk. Right. Cover. I need cover. I'm getting in with the rubber. Do not laugh. Do not distract me. If anybody asks, I am a rubber."

Rae pressed her lips together and looked very hard at her shoes.

There was a long pause from the pencil case.

"…She's gone," said Gribble eventually, his voice all squashed, because he was apparently still flat against the rubber and had forgotten to climb off it. "That was close. That was very close. Do you see now. Do you see what I deal with. You can't relax for one second out here. Not one."

And then, quieter, with the squashed sound gone and something tireder underneath it:

"It's very big, isn't it. Out here. With no controls and no job and nothing to hold on to. It's very big, and it's very loud, and it doesn't slow down for you, not for one second." A pause. "I don't know how you've stood it. Sat right at the back all these years with no say in anything, in the dark, while I drove. I never once thought about that. What it was like for you, back there." Another pause. "I should have given you the wheel for a corner now and then. That's all. Just a corner."

You can give me a corner now, Rae thought gently. I've got us. Have your rest.

And the strangest thing happened: he did. For the last ten minutes of assembly, while Rae sat in the warm quiet and sang in roughly the right place and steered her own slow, careful body up when everyone stood and down when everyone sat, Gribble said nothing at all. He just rested, in the pencil case, in the quiet classroom, for the first time in eleven years.

When it was over she walked herself back, already a little better at it, and at the desk she lifted him out of the pencil case and up to her ear, and he climbed back in through the little fold, and took hold of his half of the controls, and let out a long breath as the old heat and noise closed round him again.

"…Thank you," he said. Gruff. Like it cost him something. "For coming back. I knew you would. But thank you for coming back."

And it was the thank you that did it, because Gribble did not say thank you, Gribble had never once said thank you in eleven years, and Rae understood then, properly, all the way down, that the two of them were going to be alright, and that the only thing left was to make it official.

Entry 5: Food, and the Eating Of It in Public. The dinner queue is where the real work is done. Approach with caution. Trust nothing. Above all, beware the second dinner lady, the one with the ladle, who will ask you a question while your mouth is committed to a decision about chips.

By lunch Rae had a plan, but the plan needed quiet, and the dinner queue was not quiet, and the dinner queue went wrong in the usual way.

"Pasta," Gribble decided as they shuffled forward. "Not the curry. I've seen what the curry does to this body and I'm not doing that again on a Tuesday."

The boy in front, Marcus, got to the counter, said something easy, and the dinner lady laughed. A real one. Out of nowhere. Gribble watched it the way you watch a magician you can't catch out.

"Look at that," he muttered. "Just brings it out. Keeps one in his pocket, ready. Some of us never got given a laugh. Some of us have had to make our own, out of bits, like everything else."

Then it was their turn. Rae pointed at the pasta. She said please. She got it right, and Gribble let out the small proud grunt of a workman watching a shelf go up straight.

And that was exactly when the second dinner lady, the one with the ladle, fired.

"Anything else, love? Bit of pudding?"

The grunt died.

Gribble froze. He looked at the ladle. He looked for the manual, which was somehow already on the floor, miles away, no chance of reaching it. And he knew, the way you know right before you drop something, that he was going to have to improvise, which he hated, because improvising was undignified, and dignity was the one thing Gribble had left.

He reached out, hand shaking, and pulled the lever marked COUGH.

Rae coughed. A massive cough, out of nowhere, for no reason, a cough that bent her right over her tray. And it bought Gribble exactly the two seconds he needed to go for the oldest trick in his whole ramshackle box.

"Drop the tray," he ordered. "Break away. I'm not proud of this. I want that on the record. But needs must. DROP THE TRAY."

Rae's hands, even though she was personally telling them not to, opened.

The tray went down with a noise like the end of the world. Pasta one way, fork the other. And the whole dinner hall did the thing dinner halls always do: that long "OOOOOOOH" that goes up to the ceiling and then rains right back down on the one kid standing there in the wreck of their lunch.

Gribble, dignity in bits, edges flickering like a dying torch, did the only thing left when you're losing. He moaned.

"Wonderful," he said bitterly, over the jeering. "Eleven years, not one dropped tray. And the one morning the ship wakes up early and puts me right off, this. And do you know whose fault they'll say it is. Mine. Always mine. Nobody ever blames the road."

Stop, Rae thought. And she didn't think it in a panic. She thought it the way you'd put your hand flat on a scared dog, because she'd started, in just one strange day, to learn the difference. Stop. Look. It's only a tray. Nobody's hurt. They'll have forgotten by home time. Let go of the lever.

There was a long, prickly, hurt little pause.

"I knew that," said Gribble, very stiffly, and let go.

A dinner lady came over with a roll of blue paper and said, "Don't you worry, love, happens ten times a day," and helped her clean up. The OOOOH had already moved on, the way it always does. Rae carried her new plate to a quiet end of a table and sat down. Like a normal person. Not like someone running away.

She ate one forkful of pasta before she said it.

Gribble, she thought. After school. I need to come in. Properly. Into the cockpit. We need to talk, and I don't mean through the wall.

The fork stopped halfway to her mouth, all by itself.

"Nobody comes into the cockpit," said Gribble.

I'm coming into the cockpit.

He didn't answer. But the fork started moving again, slowly, and somewhere down in the dark she felt him tidying, frantically, the way you do when someone says they're coming round.

Mr Briggs kept her behind at the end of the day, which Gribble took as a personal attack.

He wasn't a mean teacher, though you'd have had a job convincing Gribble of that, and you'd have had a job convincing Mr Briggs of it either. He was old, and he'd been teaching children since before anyone's parents were born, and he held the firm opinion that it was a serious trade and that most of what the headmaster sent round in emails was, in his own word, botheration. He wore a shirt and tie that plainly tortured him, and he told anyone who'd listen that he only wore them because he was made to, "to set an example," as if a tie ever set anyone an example of anything. He had tufts of grey hair that went their own way and smudges of pencil crayon down the side of his hand, because he drew, all the time, in the margins of everything. He drank strong dark tea out of a chipped mug so stained you couldn't tell what colour it had started. The interactive smartboard at the front of his classroom was switched off, and stayed switched off, because glowing screens got him, as he put it, in a temper. And the walls weren't covered in rainbows and inspirational mottoes. They were covered in his own drawings: ordinary streets, a man putting out his bins, rain on a bus window. True things.

Gribble did not see a kind, shy old man who cared too much to say so. Gribble saw the most dangerous kind of teacher there was: the kind who looked like he could see straight through the Nod and Smile lever to whatever you were really up to underneath.

"He's going to ask how we're getting on," he said, once the room was just them and the hum of the corridor. He'd spent the last few minutes pre-loading, which was his word for imagining every single disaster in advance so that none of them could surprise him. It had never once worked, and he would not stop doing it. "And we won't have an answer. How are WE supposed to know how we're getting on. That's HIS information. He's sitting on it. And that one sees things. I don't like teachers that see things."

Then we say we're getting on fine, Rae thought, and we ask if there's anything he thinks we should work on. That makes us sound like we're trying. And it puts the question back on his side of the desk, where it came from.

There was a suspicious little silence.

"…Where did you get that," Gribble demanded.

I thought of it. I'm allowed to think of things. I've been in here the whole time, you know. I just wasn't helping. I'm sorry. I'm going to start.

"I don't need help," said Gribble. Automatically. The way you say ow.

Mr Briggs wasn't perched on the edge of his desk trying to look friendly. He was attacking the desk, squaring off a great drift of paper, banging the edges of it straight, muttering. "Cohorts," he was saying, to nobody, with deep disgust. "Discrete areas. Two hours of my life. Two hours, for words that mean nothing, that no child ever said in their life." He noticed her. "Right. You. Sit down a sec." He poured the last of the dark tea down his throat and pulled a face. "Don't worry, you're not in trouble. Nobody's in trouble. I've had enough trouble for one day, I'm not making more." He looked at her over the top of his glasses. "How d'you reckon you're getting on, then. And don't give me the answer you think I want, I've heard it nine hundred times today, it's worn out."

"Pretty well, I think," said Rae. And then, because the idea was hers and she had it ready: "Is there anything you think I should work on?"

Mr Briggs stopped banging his papers.

Rae watched it happen from behind her own eyes, and it was really interesting. The grumpiness slid off him, the way frost goes off a window when the sun gets on it, and underneath was just a tired, kind, slightly awkward old man who had not expected to be asked a real question at twenty past three on a Tuesday.

He put the papers down. He looked at her properly.

"Aye," he said. "Since you ask. You sit at the back, and you keep your head down, and you go quiet, and you think nobody's noticed you doing it." He tapped the side of his own nose, leaving a smudge of pencil crayon on it. "I notice. I notice because I did it myself, at your age, for the same reason, which is that it's safer down at the back and the world's a lot, and people are a lot, and keeping quiet feels like keeping out of trouble." He leaned back. "But here's the thing, and I'll only say it the once, so have it. You've got true things to say. I can tell. I can always tell the quiet ones who've got nothing and the quiet ones who've got plenty and are sat on it, and you're the second sort." He gathered his stained mug and his pencils. "Life's hard, and it doesn't get a lot softer, and the snowman always melts in the end, every single time, that's just how it goes. So you might as well put your hand up while you're here, and tell the truth about it, and let folk hear you. There's no sense being one of the world's best-kept secrets. Right. Off you go. I've cohorts to be getting back to. Botheration."

Gribble watched all of this and, for the first time all day, did not say one word.

He watched the terrifying teacher who saw things put down his bundle of nonsense paperwork and his stained mug and turn, for about thirty seconds, into something soft and tired and unmistakably kind. And he watched how the man did it: how he hid all that softness behind the moaning and the banging and the botheration, the way you'd hide something fragile at the bottom of a drawer, under the junk, so nobody could get at it.

He moans, Gribble thought slowly, to himself, in a tone Rae had not heard him use before. He moans like I moan. The whole day. The tie, and the screens, and the cohorts. It's not because he's nasty. It's a shield. He's not grumpy. He's shy. He's tired. He's just getting the day done, same as. He didn't finish the thought. But something in him had gone very still and very thoughtful, like a creature who has spent eleven years certain that nobody anywhere carried what he carried, or got through a day the way he had to get through it, and has just caught, very faint and very far off, the sound of somebody else getting through theirs.

When Mr Briggs had gone back to his banging, Gribble spoke. Quietly. All the bluster gone. What was left sounded small.

"Was that allowed?" he said. It wasn't really even a question. "Doing it like that. Soft. Just… asking him. Was that allowed the whole time?"

Yes, Rae thought. I think it was.

"Nobody told me," said Gribble. "Nobody ever gave me that page. I'd have done it years ago, the soft way, if anyone had said it was allowed." Then, because feeling small frightened him, he puffed himself back up. "Not that I needed telling. I'd have got there. I was getting there."

I know, Rae thought. Come on. Let's go home. And then I'm coming in.

Entry, undated. On the Washing of a Flight Suit. A pilot's suit gets dirty. This is not widely known, because nobody ever sees it. The pilot sees it. The pilot has to get it clean again somehow, on his own, with whatever he can find, after everyone else has gone to bed. Add it to the list of things nobody thanks you for. The list is long. The pilot keeps it in his head, because there is no more room in the manual.

That evening, while Rae lay in the warm bath holding the controls herself for a bit, the way she was learning to, Gribble took the chance to climb out and do his washing.

His flight suit was filthy. It had been a filthy sort of day. There was orange juice down one sleeve, and pasta sauce on the collar, and a long grey smear of pure panic right across the front from the business with the trains. He climbed up onto the cold edge of the sink, where Rae had left a sliver of soap, and he set to work: dip the suit in the puddle round the plughole, scrub at the stain with both big hands, wring it out, hold it up, check it, find it no cleaner, dip it again. Dip, scrub, wring, check. Dip, scrub, wring, check.

The panic-smear would not shift. He scrubbed at it, and scrubbed, and his arms ached, and the bathroom was cold, and behind him Rae hummed in the warm water without a care in the world, the way a ship is supposed to.

And then he stopped, because he had caught sight of himself in the great dark mirror over the sink.

There he was. A tiny grey-green creature, soaked to the elbows, hair stuck flat to his head, holding up a dripping suit that would never really come clean, in the middle of a freezing bathroom, at the end of a day that nobody would ever know he had got them through. He looked at himself for a long time.

"…What's it all for, then," he said, very quietly, to his own reflection. "Eh? Eleven years. Scrubbing the same stains out of the same suit. Getting her through one day so I can get her through the next, so I can get her through the one after that, on and on, and then what. Nobody sees. Nobody knows. You do the whole job in the dark and you wash your own suit in the cold and there's no…" He trailed off. He didn't have the word for what there was no. He had never been given that page either.

For a moment he just stood there, small and dripping and tired right down to his bones.

Then he sighed, the long sigh of a creature who has asked himself the big question many times and always landed in the end on the same plain, unglamorous answer, and he wrung the suit out one more time, hard.

"Because it has to be done," he told the reflection. "That's what it's for. It has to be done, and there's nobody else to do it. So."

And that, for eleven years, had been the end of that conversation.

He hung the suit over the toothbrush to dry, and climbed back in, damp and grumbling, with absolutely no idea that the conversation was not, this time, over. That tonight, for the first time in eleven years, somebody had heard the question. And was about to come and find him with an answer.

Entry 6: The Cockpit. It is hot in here. It is loud in here. It is held together with elastic bands and hope. None of this is the pilot's fault. The pilot would like that noted.

They did it that evening, with her bedroom door shut and her back against the wall and the house quiet downstairs.

She didn't really know how she went inside. She just closed her eyes and turned her attention down and in, like turning down a road she'd walked past a hundred times and never gone down. And then she was in the cockpit, and the heat hit her like opening an oven door.

It was filthy in there. That was the first thing.

A tiny, low room, hot all over, lit by warning lamps in every shade of bad-news orange and red, none of which were ever switched off, because, she realised, you couldn't switch them off. That was sort of the point of them. Pipes ran across the ceiling, dripping. There were levers everywhere, all different, some of them clearly the handles off other, older machines. One was definitely a toilet flush. The steering was made of bits of about four different bikes, held together with elastic bands and conviction.

And it was all labelled, every bit of it, in Gribble's own biro hand, gone over and over to make it look official. There was a dial called SUDDEN URGE TO EAT CARDBOARD. There was a switch called LAUGH AT THE WRONG MOMENT (STUCK). There was a button, worn smooth and a bit sad, marked EMERGENCY INVISIBILITY, and underneath, in smaller letters: (DOES NOT WORK. HAVE TRIED. KEEP TRYING.)

In the middle of it, soaked in sweat, grey under his amber eyes, sat Gribble. Both big hands on the controls. Even now. Even with nothing happening. Because letting go wasn't a thing he remembered how to do.

He didn't look up. He'd heard her come in, she could tell, because his ears had swivelled towards her. But he wasn't going to give her the satisfaction.

"It's not as bad as it looks," he said, to the controls. "I keep it tidy. It's just an old machine. They don't make them like this any more. You have to find the parts yourself. You have to make do. And then people come in and have a good look round and pull a face."

"I'm not pulling a face," said Rae. She crouched down next to him, in the heat, in the noise, and looked round properly. "I like it, actually."

Gribble snorted.

"I do," she said. "You made all of this. Out of bits. Out of nothing. You wrote a label on every single lever in your own handwriting so you'd never get lost in the dark. It's the cleverest little room I've ever seen, and you built it on your own when you were small, and nobody helped you, and it's kept us going for eleven years. I think it's brilliant."

Gribble looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned back to the controls. "You're being kind," he said, in the flat voice of someone who has decided in advance not to fall for it. "People are kind when they feel sorry for you. I know the difference. I've got a whole page on it."

"I'm not being kind. I mean it. I like your cockpit."

"Nobody likes the cockpit," said Gribble, with total certainty, the way you'd say nobody likes being stung by a wasp. But his ears had come up, just a little, and they stayed up, and he didn't say anything more about faces.

She looked at the controls properly for the first time, and saw there were way, way too many of them for one small creature. The heart. The lungs. The face. The voice. Watching every room. Working out every wave. And the big one, the one that never stopped: making one ordinary girl look ordinary, second by second, all day long, in a world that never once said you can have a rest now.

She saw the manual, fat with eleven years of notes, every page a rule he'd worked out on his own, in the dark, in a panic, with nobody ever to check whether he'd even got it right.

And on a hook by the wheel, she saw a kid's crayon drawing of a knight. The armour coloured in carefully. The visor down.

"Don't look at that," said Gribble, sharp, seeing where her eyes had gone. Then, because wanting something and being proud live right next door to each other: "…I wanted to be that. When I was little. A knight. All steel. Sealed up. Visor down. Nothing gets in, and you always know what to do, because they write the rules on the inside of the armour where you can read them." He looked down at his own big hands, scuffed and shaking, the freckles lost under soot. "And instead I got this. Meat. It's all just meat. I kept waiting for somebody to bring me the steel, and it was always, only, ever, more meat."

Why didn't you ask me to help? Rae thought. It didn't come out like telling-off. It came out soft and sad, because she'd been right here, in the same body, the whole time, and she hadn't known.

Gribble made a sound that was nearly a laugh. His edges flickered.

"Ask the ship," he said. "Ask the ship for help. Good one. A pilot doesn't ask the ship. The ship can't help. The ship doesn't even know it's being flown, and that's the whole point of a ship. You keep it flying, and you keep it safe, and you never, ever let it find out there's somebody up here doing it. Because if it found out, it'd know."

Know what?

"How close we always are," said Gribble. And his eyes flicked, just for a second, to the corner.

In the corner, under a cracked plastic cover, was a big red lever. Written on it, in Gribble's own hand, gone over and over in biro to make it look official, were two words: EVERYTHING OFF.

Rae understood it straight away. It was the lever for the days when everything got too loud and too bright and too much. When the only thing left that Gribble knew how to do was pull it, and switch it all down, the voice and the face and the looking-up and the joining-in, and go small and dark and quiet until the world stopped pushing. She'd done it herself. Loads of times. She just never knew there was another hand on it.

She didn't say anything about the lever. You don't, when you've only just found it, say anything about the big red lever. You just sort of move so that you're sitting between it and the pilot. Casual. Like you meant to sit there all along.

What finally broke Gribble wasn't the lever. It wasn't Rae being kind. It wasn't even the heat.

It was the toast.

Because right then, down in Rae's stomach, the toast she'd had for breakfast moved, the way breakfast does. Totally normal. Nothing. But Gribble was wound up to his very last turn, worn right down past the last little scrap of himself, and when he heard that small gurgle he flinched like it was an explosion. He grabbed for a lever. He missed. His hand slipped on the sweaty handle. And the manual slid off its shelf, and the bulldog clip burst, and eleven years of rules went everywhere, sliding all across the hot floor and under the controls and out of reach.

Gribble looked at the pages. All of it. Everything he knew, lying in the dirt.

And the thing that had been holding him up for eleven years, the grumpiness, the bluster, the stiff proud back, all of it came off in his hands at once, like a door you've pulled way too hard.

He put his face in his big hands and he cried.

In the heat, in the noise, with the engine running too hot all around him, he cried the way you cry when you've kept yourself going by being cross for years and years, and somebody finally, just for a second, lets you stop.

Rae didn't tell him everything was fine. She'd worked out, by now, the difference between the stuff you say to calm a scared thing down and the thing you actually do. Which is to stay there in the heat with it, and not leave.

She put her hand over his big hands on the controls.

Right, she thought, when he'd gone quiet. Here's what we're going to do. And I want to say this first, so we're clear: this isn't me saying you can't manage. You've managed. Eleven years. Off half a manual. On your own. And the ship's still here, in one piece. That's a record any pilot would be proud of. I'm saying it's a two-person job. And you've been doing it on your own. That was never fair. And it stops today.

There was a silence. When Gribble spoke he was all wet and gruff and trying really hard to make it sound like he was doing her the favour.

"…A two-person job," he said. "Well. I've always said that. For years. To nobody. But I've said it."

They wrote the new deal on the back of the least-ruined page of the manual, because Gribble wouldn't believe a thing was real unless it was written down and looked official.

Gribble would keep the fast stuff. The instinct. The spark. The gut feeling. The engine itself, and the heat, and the never-give-up, and the thing that knew a room had gone wrong before there was any way of knowing it. That was his, and he was good at it, and Rae said so, out loud, because she'd worked out that the fastest way to get a proud thing to say yes is to be caught admiring its work.

And Rae would take the slow stuff. Reading a room after the gut had flagged it. Working out other people. The face. The voice. And the manual, all of it, the whole massive folder of made-up rules, lifted off his little shoulders and onto hers, where there turned out to be loads of room.

"You'd take the manual," said Gribble, eyeing the scattered pages like a man watching someone offer to carry his bags. "The whole manual."

The whole manual. You feel it. You tell me. I decide. And if I get it wrong, it's my fault, and you're allowed to be completely unbearable about it.

"I'm usually unbearable about things," Gribble admitted. "It's one of my only treats."

I know, Rae thought. I'd miss it if you stopped.

Gribble looked at the red lever. Then at Rae, sitting in front of it. Then, for a long moment, at the crayon knight on its hook. The sealed-up steel. The thing he'd always wanted to be and never could.

And then he did something Rae hadn't seen him do all day. He reached up and took the drawing down. He looked at it. He folded it once, carefully, and put it in his pocket. He didn't throw it away. He just put it away. The way you put away something you've finished needing.

"It'll still be hot in here," he warned, gruff. "I'm not promising it goes quiet. I've tried. It doesn't know how."

I'm not asking it to be quiet, Rae thought. I'm asking it to stop being quiet on its own.

Gribble wiped his face on a rag that made everything worse. He squared his little knobbly shoulders. He put his big hands back on his half of the controls, the engine half, the fast half, the half he'd always wanted. And for the first time in years he took his hands off all the rest, the face and the voice and the manual, and let go, and waited, clearly braced, to see if the whole lot fell apart.

It didn't fall apart.

Rae picked up the controls he'd put down. They fit her hands. She'd had a taste of it that morning, twenty minutes of it, slow and careful in the quiet of the hall. Now she took them properly, for good.

And in the soft orange light, just for a second, before the next alarm went off, the edges of one small grey-green goblin called Gribble stopped flickering. And went soft. And steady. And still.

Entry, undated. On Maintenance. The machine is old. It was old when the pilot inherited it. Half of it is held together with elastic bands, and elastic bands do not last forever, and neither, if the pilot is honest, which he tries very hard not to be, does the machine. The pilot does not write this part down. Some things you keep off the page.

That same night, long after the talking was done and Rae was deep asleep, the elastic band holding the steering column together finally snapped.

It had been going for weeks. You could hear it, a little creak on left turns, and he had kept meaning to do something about it and kept not having the time, because there was never any time, and now it had gone, twang, in the small hours, the way these things always do.

For a moment Gribble sat in the dark cockpit and looked at the loose steering column in his hands, and thought, the way you do at three in the morning, about how the whole machine was held together like this, with bits and bodges and things found down the backs of sofas, and how one day, some day, a day he did not let himself look at directly, there would be a snap he couldn't fix. Then he put the thought away, because there was a job to do, and you cannot do a job and look straight at that thought at the same time.

He thought about waking Rae. He could, now. That was the strangest part of the whole strange day, stranger than any of it: that for the first time in eleven years there was somebody he was allowed to wake, somebody who would rub her eyes and say what do you need. He sat with that for a second, turning it over in his big hands like a found coin.

Then he decided to let her sleep. She'd had a day. He'd nip out and sort it himself, one last solo run, for old times' sake.

So he climbed out, and went looking for an elastic band.

The junk drawer was in the hall, which meant crossing the landing, which meant the open dark and the cold and the long carpet stretching away like a great hairy field. He was halfway across it when the cat found him.

The cat was called Biscuit, and Biscuit was enormous, and Biscuit lowered her great head down to Gribble's level and regarded him with two huge yellow eyes and one slowly twitching tail.

Gribble put his hands on his hips.

"Don't you start," he said.

Biscuit stared.

"Oh, I know your sort," said Gribble, not remotely frightened, only deeply and profoundly annoyed. "Sleep all day, do you. Sixteen hours, is it, on the warm radiator, the one they keep on for you, while some of us do a fourteen-hour shift and have our tea on the cold one. And then you wake up and you cry at a bowl until somebody fills it, and they come running, every time, because you're a cat and you're a wally and you've never done a hard day's work in your life. Have you ever piloted anything. Have you. No. You haven't. You couldn't pilot a wet paper bag down a hill, you great daft article."

Biscuit, who understood not one word of this but objected strongly to the tone, sat down on the carpet directly in his path and began, pointedly, to wash a paw.

"Typical," said Gribble, and went round her.

He got into the junk drawer through the gap at the back and foraged about among the dead batteries and the spare buttons and the keys to doors that did not exist any more, and he came out a long time later with three elastic bands, a paperclip, and, after a serious internal debate, a single fluffy thing he was fairly sure was the corner of a slipper. He had not found a use for slippers in eleven years. He took it anyway. You never knew.

By the time he had climbed back in and lashed the steering column up tight, the sky was going grey at the edges, and the morning shift was coming, and Biscuit had fallen asleep right across the warm radiator like she owned the place, which, in fairness, she did.

"…Night, then," Gribble told her, gruffly, on his way past, and did not entirely mean it as an insult.

Entry 7: Laughing. The most dangerous human activity there is. The body is wide open. Anything can get in. The pilot has protocols for Angry, for Bored, for Smells Like Cabbage, for a spontaneous badger stampede and for a torrential downpour of pickles. The pilot has no protocol whatsoever for when somebody is lovely.

It took them till the next breaktime to find out whether the new arrangement actually worked, because that was when Rae finally crossed the playground to Sam.

There was a girl called Sam. Rae had wanted to be friends with her since September, in that hopeless way where you've already decided it'll never happen, so you let yourself want it as much as you like. Sam was new this year. She did jigsaws at wet play. And once, in the reading corner, she'd said a thing to Rae about a book, a real, proper thing, about how the dog in it was the cleverest one in the whole story. Rae had been working on her reply ever since. She'd got it nearly perfect. She'd just never actually said it.

Sam was sitting on the low wall by the bins, on her own, peeling the label off a juice carton in long strips.

"This is the big one," said Gribble, and for once Rae didn't argue, because for once he was right. "The lollipop lady was a warm-up. The tray was nothing. This is the one the whole job's for. And I'll be straight with you, because we're a two-person crew now and that's how a crew works: I'm scared. I haven't said that out loud in eleven years, on account of my dignity. But there it is."

Me too, Rae thought. That's allowed as well. But listen. You know what this is, don't you? This is the bit you always wanted. This is the knight bit.

There was a small, wary silence.

"…The knight bit," said Gribble.

The knight. All steel. Visor down. Walking straight at the scary thing because somebody has to. That's what you drew. That's what you wanted to be. She was already moving towards the wall now, slow and steady. Here's the secret they left out of the manual, Gribble. Knights are scared too. The visor isn't for not being scared. The visor's for going anyway. So put your visor down. We're going in together.

There was a pause. Then, very quietly, in a voice with no moaning in it at all, Gribble said, "…I never had a visor. It was just a drawing."

Then we'll pretend, Rae thought. Visor down.

And after a moment, gruff and small and braver than he'd been in eleven years, Gribble put both hands on the engine and said, "…Visor down."

She crossed the playground. It was the longest walk she'd ever done. The engine roared, hot and ready, and her hands weren't quite hers and weren't quite Gribble's but something the two of them were doing together. She got to the wall. Sam looked up.

And Rae saw, with her half of the controls, the thing Gribble's panic had completely missed. Sam looked scared too. Her fingers were going round and round the edge of the carton. Round and round.

Look at her, Gribble, Rae thought.

"…At her hands," said Gribble. "Why is she doing that with her hands."

Because she's scared it'll go wrong. Same as us. Look properly.

And Gribble looked properly, for the first time in his life, at another person, and went quiet.

"Can I sit here?" said Rae. It came out at the right volume. Not braced.

Sam shuffled up to make room. Which is its own kind of yes.

"You said the dog was the cleverest one in the book," said Rae. "Back in September. I've been wanting to tell you for ages. I think you're right. I think it's the dog. I've got a whole thing about it. I've practised it loads."

"You've practised it?" said Sam. And she lit right up. She wasn't laughing at her. "I've been wanting to talk to you about that book since September. I thought you weren't bothered. You always go really quiet."

"I'm not not bothered," said Rae. "I just go quiet."

"Same," said Sam, like it was the truest thing in the world. "I go so quiet. My mum says I've got two settings and they're both wrong."

And Rae laughed. A real one. Out of nowhere, up through the inside of her head, with Gribble whooping somewhere down below and not touching a single lever. And Sam laughed too, the helpless kind, the kind that comes when you find out the other person's just as much of a mess as you are, and you're so relieved you could cry.

And then, right in the middle of laughing, Sam coughed. A massive cough, out of nowhere, for no reason at all. She slapped a hand over her mouth and went bright red. "Oh my gosh, sorry. I don't even know why I did that."

Behind Rae's eyes, Gribble went very still.

His ears swivelled right round. He leaned forward at the controls and stared out through her, at Sam, at Sam's red face and her hand clapped over her mouth.

"…That cough," he said. Quiet. Careful. Not like himself at all. "Rae. That cough. I know that cough."

It's just a cough, Rae thought.

"It is not just a cough," said Gribble. "That is a break-contact cough. That is the exact cough I pull when we're cornered. Somebody in there just grabbed the COUGH lever."

For a second the whole playground seemed to go quiet.

Somebody in there, Rae thought.

"She's got one," said Gribble. And his gravelly voice did something it had never done before. It wobbled. "She's got a pilot. In there. Working her. Same as me." He was quiet for a moment. "Hot in there. Cramped. A manual that's never finished. I know exactly what it's like in there, because I've been in there eleven years, and not once, not one single time, did I think there was anybody else doing it. Anywhere in the whole world." He sat back slowly. "I'll bet they've lost half their manual too. I'll bet they've no page for this either. Poor little thing. Pedalling away in the dark with the rest of them, thinking they're the only one."

And Rae understood it, all at once, the way the last piece of a jigsaw suddenly shows you the whole picture. She looked round the playground. At all the running and the shrieking and the queuing and the showing off. At Dylan Pryce, even, kicking a ball against a wall, looking back at it like it owed him something. At every easy-looking kid she'd ever practised a wave for. And she got it. Every single one of them was a little machine made of meat, steaming gently in the cold, driven by something small and scared and proud that nobody was ever, ever supposed to see.

There were no perfect people. There never had been. There was just everybody, doing their best out of a hot little room behind their eyes, off half a manual, hoping nobody noticed.

Sam was still pink. She'd started peeling her carton label again, in quick little strips, the way you do when you're sure you've wrecked something.

So Rae did the only decent thing. The thing she'd needed, her whole life, somebody to do for her.

"Hey," she said. "It's alright. Honestly. You don't have to be embarrassed." She chose the words carefully, because they were true in a way she couldn't exactly explain. "Everyone's got someone in there. Working really hard. Keeping them going. You're not the only one who finds it difficult."

Sam looked at her. The red went out of her face, slowly. She let go of the carton.

"Yeah," she said. And she smiled, a soft, relieved sort of smile, the smile of someone who thinks they've just been told a kind thing. "I suppose everyone's got their own stuff going on, haven't they. That's a really nice way to put it."

"Yeah," said Rae. "Something like that."

And only Rae, and one small worn-out goblin behind her eyes, knew that she hadn't meant it as a nice way to put it at all. She'd meant it exactly, completely, precisely as true.

The bell went for the end of break.

"Can I tell you the thing about the dog?" said Rae. "It's quite long. It's got, like, three bits."

"Tell me the best bit," said Sam. And she budged up on the wall to make room. The way you make room for someone you've decided to keep.

And behind Rae's eyes, Gribble put both hands back on the engine. His half. The half he'd always wanted. He was quiet for a moment, which was rare for him. Then he said it, gruff and grumbling and warm as a struck match, in the voice of a creature that would swear blind it never happened:

"…Not the only one, then." A pause. "Well. Fancy that."

And the engine ran, hot and loud and crewed at last, all the way back in to afternoon lessons.

Entry 8: Waiting. When a plan is running late, the pilot must assume the worst. This is not gloominess. It is preparation. The pilot would far rather be braced for a catastrophe that does not happen than caught out by one that does. (The catastrophes do not happen. The pilot is still waiting for the one that proves him right.)

Mum was late.

Rae stood at the school gate and watched the other kids get collected, one by one, until the playground was nearly empty and the caretaker had started stacking the cones. The car was not there. The car was always there.

Behind her eyes, Gribble began, very quietly, to lose his mind.

"She's not coming," he said.

She's coming. She's just late.

"She's not coming. Think about it. She's never late. She's the sort of person who's early. So if she's late, then something has stopped her. Something big. Something has happened." He was warming up now, pacing the cockpit, the ear-tug going. "There's been a crash. Or she's forgotten us. People forget things. She had a lot on this morning, I saw her face, she had a list. We weren't on the list. We've been left off the list."

Gribble.

"Or," he said, and his voice dropped, because this was the real one, the one that had been hiding underneath all the others, "she's finally worked out how much hard work we are. The dropped trays. The cackling. The diving under desks. And she's decided, very sensibly, that she's had quite enough, and she's moved house, and she hasn't told us, and right now there's a different girl living in our bedroom, eating our cereal, and we're going to have to live here. At the school. Behind the bins. With the cones."

He stopped, breathing hard, completely convinced. For one whole second he genuinely believed they lived behind the bins now.

And Rae, who had spent eleven years being driven by this, and who had learned today that you cannot argue a frightened thing out of a corner, did not argue. She did something better.

You're right, she thought. It's probably worse than that, actually.

There was a startled silence.

"…Worse?"

Much worse. I reckon it's aliens.

"…Aliens," said Gribble.

Aliens. Big green ones. They came down over the supermarket car park while she was loading the shopping, and they beamed her straight up, her and the bags and all, and right now she's on a spaceship somewhere past the moon, trying to explain to a council of intergalactic warlords that she really does have to get back because she's got to pick her daughter up from school. And they're not having it. The head alien's just folded his seven arms and said, "Out of the question." And she's said, "But you don't understand, she'll be waiting by the bins." And he's said, "All ships must remain in orbit until the great Conjunction of Klorx." And she's gone, "The great Conjunction of WHAT."

"That's ridiculous," said Gribble.

Is it?

"Yes. There's no such thing as the Conjunction of Klorx. And aliens wouldn't want the shopping. What would aliens do with a four-pack of beans."

About as much, Rae thought gently, as a mum would do with a secret new house and a secret new girl, found and moved into between half past three and now.

There was a long pause in the cockpit.

"…That one was a bit much as well, wasn't it," said Gribble.

A bit.

"The moving house. In an afternoon. With the spare girl." He sounded almost embarrassed. "When you say it out loud."

That's the trick, Rae thought. Say it out loud. If it sounds as daft as the aliens, it's probably just as daft as the aliens.

Gribble was quiet. His ears, which had been flat to his head, came slowly back up.

"…So what's the actual answer," he said, suspicious, as if she might be hiding a real disaster up her sleeve after all.

Traffic, Rae thought. It's nearly always traffic.

And at that exact moment, as if it had been waiting in the wings for its cue, Mum's car came round the corner, indicator going, a bit too fast, and pulled up at the gate.

Mum leaned across and shoved the door open. "I'm so sorry, love, I'm so sorry, the roadworks on the ring road, it was solid, I haven't moved in twenty minutes, I was sat there going out of my mind."

"It's alright," said Rae, getting in.

"It is not alright, I'm never late, I hate being late." Mum was still gripping the wheel with both hands even though the car wasn't moving, and there was a high, tight wobble in her voice that Rae knew, that Rae knew exactly, because she'd been living right on top of its twin all day. "I kept thinking, she'll be stood there thinking I've forgotten her. She'll think her own mum's forgotten her. I had this whole picture of you by the bins, thinking nobody was ever coming. Oh, ignore me. I'm being daft. Seatbelt."

Rae did up her seatbelt.

Behind her eyes, Gribble had gone very still.

"…Rae," he said quietly. "She had a picture. Of you by the bins. Thinking nobody was coming."

I heard.

"That's a catastrophe. That's a proper, top-of-the-range, moved-house-in-an-afternoon catastrophe. Your mum's got one too. In there. Working her." He sat back, slowly, the way he had when he'd worked out Sam. "And it spent the whole ring road doing exactly what I was doing out here at the gate. Panicking about the same gap. From the other side of it." A pause. "They're everywhere, aren't they. Every car on this road. Every grown-up in it. Little pilots. All of them. All panicking. All dead certain it's only them."

Rae looked at her mum, who had stopped gripping the wheel quite so hard now and was checking her mirror and humming a little, the panic draining out of her the way it does the second the thing you dreaded turns out fine.

"Mum," said Rae. "You'd never forget me. Not in a million years. It was just traffic."

Mum looked at her, surprised. Then her face went soft, and a bit wobbly again, but the good kind of wobbly this time. "No," she said. "Never in a million years." She pulled out into the road. "Where's all this come from, eh? You're very wise all of a sudden."

"Dunno," said Rae. "Just worked some stuff out today."

And only Rae, and one small worn-out goblin behind her eyes, and quite possibly one other small worn-out goblin behind her mum's, knew exactly how much.

Gribble's Incomplete Field Guide to Human Interaction. Final entry, added later, in a different pen. Correction to the whole book: the ship is not just a ship. The ship has a pilot of her own, and always did, asleep at the back, never woken. There are two of us up here now, and the work is exactly half as heavy, which is to say it is still extremely heavy, and I am still not getting a cup of tea, but it is half. Further correction: we are not the only ship with somebody in it. Every ship has one. The girl on the wall has one. The mum in the car has one. The man who does the crossing has one. Nobody, anywhere, is flying solo. Everybody only thinks they are. Further correction: the trains are not real. Most of the rest of this manual is wrong. We are writing a new one. It is also going to be incomplete. We have decided that this is allowed.