I’m sitting with my back against the bedroom door writing this because I don’t want Rosaleen to walk in. The less she knows about this diary, the better. Already she is trying to climb inside my head; I couldn’t risk her knowing my innermost thoughts are lying about my bedroom. I’ll have to hide it. There’s an interesting-looking loose floorboard over by the corner chair that I might investigate tonight.

Once again, Mum zonked out straight after eating her dinner. She’s been sleeping so much the past two days. But this time she fell asleep in her chair. I wanted to wake her and put her in bed but Rosaleen wouldn’t let me. I’ll write this until I hear Arthur snoring and then I’ll know it’s safe to check on her.

While I’m in the safety of the house, I just want to say that I had a funny feeling while in the castle yesterday morning. I felt like somebody was there. Like somebody was watching me. It was such a sunny morning, right up until that freak cloud squeezed itself right on top of my head, and I was just sitting on the step, with this diary on my lap, and I couldn’t think of what to write and how to begin the first page and so I sunbathed instead. I don’t know how long I had my eyes closed for but I wish I’d kept them open. Someone was definitely there.

I’ll write again tomorrow.

I finished reading and looked around, my heart so loud in my ears that my breathing was rapid and sharp. That was now. I’d been writing about me now.

I suddenly felt a thousand eyes on me. As I stood up and ran down the steps, tripped on the last one and slammed into the wall. I grazed my hands and my right shoulder, dropped the book on the floor again. I felt around on the ground for it, and as I grabbed it my hand brushed against something furry and soft. I yelped and jumped away, ran into the room next door. There were no doorways out of there, all four walls were intact. I felt a few raindrops on my skin and they quickly fell faster. I went to a hole in the wall where a window used to be and tried to climb out. Once up on the ledge, I saw Rosaleen charging her way up the road with what looked like a raincoat in her hands. She was power-walking forward, a stormy look on her face, her hand held above her head as though that alone could stop her from getting wet.

I rushed to the other window, looking out to the back of the castle and I climbed out, my knees scraping against the wall as I leaped up to catch the windowsill. I landed on concrete on the other side, feeling the sting in my feet as the lack of support in my flip-flops sent pain shooting up my legs. I spied Rosaleen coming closer to the castle. I turned away, and ran.

I had no idea where I was going. My body felt like it was on autopilot. It was only when I reached the walled garden, completely soaked to the skin, that I made the connection to the diary and a shudder went through my entire body, summoning goose pimples from head to toe.

As I stood at the garden entrance, frozen with fear and trembling, a white shadow through the frosted glass of the greenhouse caught my attention. Then the door opened and Sister Ignatius appeared with a spare bee suit in her hand.

‘I knew you’d come back,’ she called, and her blue eyes sparkled mischievously against her pale skin.

I joined Sister Ignatius in the greenhouse. I stood beside her, my body rigid and tight. My shoulders were hunched up past my ears as though I was trying to disappear into my body like a tortoise. I clung to the diary so tightly my knuckles were white.

‘Oh, look at you,’ she said, in her joyful, carefree voice. ‘You’re like a drowned rat. Let me dry you off-’

‘Don’t touch me,’ I said quickly, taking a step away from her. I angled my body away from her but I sneaked a look at her now and then over my shoulder.

‘What’s happened, Tamara?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t already know.’

A quick look over my shoulder showed her eyes narrow momentarily, then open wide. She registered something. She knew something. She looked like someone who had been caught.

‘Admit it.’

‘Tamara,’ she began, then paused, searching to find the right words. ‘Tamara, look at me. I’m…let me explain…we should go somewhere else to talk. Not here. Not in this greenhouse. Not with you like this.’

‘No. First I want to hear you admit it.’

‘Tamara, I really think that we should go inside and-’

‘Admit that you wrote it,’ I snapped.

Her face instantly changed to utter confusion. ‘Tamara, I don’t understand. Admit that I wrote what?’

‘The diary,’ I exploded, and pushed it in her face. I flicked ferociously through the pages. ‘Look, it’s been written in. I hid it in my bedroom, and this morning I brought it to the castle to write it, just like you told me to, and look. How did you do it?’ I shoved it under her nose and flicked through the pages, my wet hands blurring the ink. She blinked furiously to try to focus on the pages as they raced by.

‘Tamara, calm down. I can’t see anything, you’re going too fast.’

I went faster. She reached out and with those thick hands, strangling hands, she grabbed my wrists tightly and said firmly, ‘Tamara. Stop.’

It worked. She took the diary from my hands and opened the first page. Her eyes raced across the first few lines.

‘This isn’t for me to read. These are your private thoughts.’

‘I didn’t write them.’ I knew by then that she hadn’t either. The way her face had changed to such confusion couldn’t have been faked.

‘Well…who did?’

‘I don’t know. Look at the date on the first page.’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Some of the things written are about what happens tomorrow.’

The rain pelted against the glass, so loud it felt like it was going to break through.

‘How do you know that, if tomorrow hasn’t happened yet?’ Her voice had softened, as though she was trying to coax a mental patient to put down a knife. She may very well have been, only I didn’t pick up the knife, somebody had put it in my hands. This was not of my own doing.

‘Perhaps you got up in the middle of the night and wrote it, Tamara. Maybe you were so sleepy you don’t remember doing it. I’ve often done funny things half asleep or half awake. I’ve wandered around the house looking for things when I don’t know what I’m looking for, moving things, and when I wake up in the morning and go to find something, I’m in a right muddle.’ She chuckled.

‘This isn’t the same thing,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ve written about things that have happened today that I couldn’t have known about. The rain, Rosaleen and the coat, you…’

‘What about me?’

‘I wrote that you’d be here.’

‘But I’m always here Tamara, you know that.’

Sister Ignatius kept talking then, trying to rationalise it, telling me a story about a time she’d wandered into Sister Mary’s room during the night, apparently looking for gardening gloves because she’d been dreaming of planting turnips, and she frightened the life out of Sister Mary. I tuned out. How could I have written five pages and not remembered? How could I have predicted the rain, Rosaleen’s arrival with the raincoat, Sister Ignatius waiting right here in the greenhouse with the spare beekeeping suit?

‘Our minds do unusual things sometimes, Tamara. When we’re looking for things it takes it upon itself to go down its own route. All we can do is follow.’

‘But I’m not looking for anything.’

‘Aren’t you? Ah, now it’s stopped. I told you it would. Why don’t we get you to the house to dry you off and get something hot into you? I made a soup yesterday with my own grown veg. It will be just right now, I’d say, if Sister Mary hasn’t sucked it up with a straw. She dropped her dentures yesterday and Sister Peter Regina accidentally stomped on them. Everything’s been through a straw since.’ She covered her mouth. ‘Oh, forgive me for laughing.’