Holiday

1

        Before the kidnapping, John never thought about being a slave. Why should he? H was a twelve-year-old boy who lived in an ordinary house in the suburbs.

        John was as ordinary as his suburb. He got along all right at school and he loved playing rugby. He was an expert at keeping track of the ball, and the other team could never catch him. He went swimming in summer and he saved his pocket money to go to the cinema. John’s life was a very ordinary life until he met Bob.

        No one knew where Bob had come from. He simply showed up one day, sniffing around in John’s back garden. He was a strange-looking dog, with watchful yellow eyes like a wolf and a shaggy grey coat that stood up in spikes.

        Bob was trouble. If Bob had been a boy, he would have been expelled from every school in the country. If Bob had been a man, he would have been in prison. But because Bob was a dog, John’s day just told him off and shut him outside in the garden while John was at school. Unfortunately, Bob didn’t stay in  the garden. He climbed over the gate, he dug under the fence and he scrambled through the hedge. John thought of Bob as his best friend, and he supposed that Bob felt the same about him. That was a bad mistake.

        The kidnapping happened at ten o’ clock one Monday morning. John usually caught the school bus at a quartet past eight, but at a eight o’ clock Bob jumped over the fence and raced up the street. John was afraid he’d be hit by a car, so he dashed off to the rescue. He’d be back in time to catch the bus if he hurried.

        That’s what he thought, anyway.

2

        Down the street ran John, around the corner, just in time to see Bob squeeze through a gap in the fence surrounding an old building site on the corner of Roxby and Channing streets.

        There had been an office block on the site once, but it had been knocked down months before – just about the time John had met Bob. Someone had strung orange plastic tape around, and there was wire mesh and faded signs all around.

        Danger! Keep Out! Stay Clear!

        John usually did keep off the site. This time, because of Bob, he squeezed through the gap in the fence and ran across the piles of bricks and rubble.

        John tripped and fell, biting his tongue and hurting his hands and knees. He got up in a hurry, finding his trousers torn and a big patch of wet clay on the front of his shirt. He didn’t cry, but he did make a few terrible faces.

        He began to pick his way across the rubble. He knew he’d already missed the bus, so he thought he might as well find Bob and then go home and clean himself up. Dad would be at work, but there was a spare key hidden in the meter box.

        “Bob?” called John. “BOB!”

        The bricks were rattling and scrunching under his feet as he walked, but he thought heard a faint yap from somewhere.

        “Bob? Come out here, you no-good dog!”

        Just beyond the place where he had fallen, there was a big slab of concrete, set at an angle. John sat down on it while he dabbed at his bleeding knee and kept on calling for his dog. Now that he’d stopped moving, he could hear a faint humming. It sounded like a refrigerator, or perhaps a microwave oven.