After Harry was beaten up by shadows, someone suggested he go to self-defence classes, so he got tennis lessons from a woman called Brenda, who taught tennis as a martial art.
   Harry was terrified of her. He ran away in the middle of the first lesson, but she followed him. She was determined to track him down and teach him tennis whether he liked it or not. He needed protection, and he thought that Amelia would make the perfect bodyguard. She was so tall she could lean over him and look at his back when she was standing in front of him. He used to pay her to do this.
   He asked her to stand next to him and she agreed, but only if he stood next to her as well. She'd follow him around and occupy the space by his side as long as he spent some time following her around.
   She wanted to go to watch her sister look for her car keys in a field. "She thinks she lost them when she was walking the dog," Amelia said to Harry, "but they're actually in her car."
   They spent two hours looking at her sister in the field. Amelia thought it was hilarious, but Harry was bored. When her sister gave up the search, he took Amelia to another field to watch his friends re-enact a battle between goblins and aliens. She got bored after a few minutes and she started talking about a film she saw when she was six. It was about people who had birds in their heads. This was all she could remember about the film, but she still managed to talk about it for over an hour.
   They needed to find something they both enjoyed. They experimented with lots of different activities. They went roller-blading and they went to pottery classes. They watched a performance by architects who were settling a difference of opinion concerning an aspect of the design of a building they were working on. This was how the performance was advertised on a poster, but it was really just mud-wrestling. Many more people would have attended the performance if it had been advertised as mud-wrestling.
   They finally found an activity they both enjoyed when they realised that they shared an interest in birds. They spent many evenings bird-watching together. He didn't mind when she rambled on about what it would feel like to have birds in your head, and she got used to listening to him talk about how many cabbages you'd have to throw at an orc to make him fall over. Sometimes they noticed Brenda lurking in the shadows, wielding her tennis racket, but she was kept at bay by the presence of Amelia.