It wasn’t until I was nearing the end of the pile that I became certain there was somebody standing outside the barn, just beside the doorway. I’d left the door open because that’s how it was normally, and because I wanted the light; and twice already I’d found myself glancing up, thinking I’d heard some small noise. But there’d been no one there, and I’d just gone on with what I was doing. Now I was certain, though, and lowering my magazine I made a heavy sighing sound that would be clearly audible.

I waited for giggling, or maybe for two or three students to come bursting into the barn, eager to make the best of having caught me with a pile of porn mags. But nothing happened. So I called out, in what I tried to make a weary tone:

“Delighted you could join me. Why be so shy?”

There was a little chuckle, then Tommy appeared at the threshold. “Hi, Kath,” he said sheepishly.

“Come on in, Tommy. Join in the fun.”

He came towards me cautiously, then stopped a few steps away. Then he looked over to the boiler, and said: “I didn’t know you liked that sort of stuff.”

“Girls are allowed too, aren’t we?”

I kept going through the pages, and for the next few seconds he stayed silent. Then I heard him say:

“I wasn’t trying to spy on you. But I saw you from my room. I saw you come out here and pick up that pile Keffers left.”

“You’re very welcome to them when I’ve finished.”

He laughed awkwardly. “It’s just sex stuff. I expect I’ve seen them all already.” He did another laugh, but then when I glanced up, I saw he was watching me with a serious expression. Then he asked:

“Are you looking for something, Kath?”

“What do you mean? I’m just looking at dirty pictures.”

“Just for kicks?”

“I suppose you could say that.” I put down one mag and started on the next one.

Then I heard Tommy’s steps coming nearer until he was right up to me. When I looked up again, his hands were hovering fretfully in the air, like I was doing a complicated manual task and he was itching to help.

“Kath, you don’t… Well, if it’s for kicks, you don’t do it like that. You’ve got to look at the pictures much more carefully. It doesn’t really work if you go that fast.”

“How do you know what works for girls? Or maybe you’ve looked these over with Ruth. Sorry, not thinking.”

“Kath, what are you looking for?”

I ignored him. I was nearly at the end of the pile and I was now keen to finish. Then he said:

“I saw you doing this once before.”

This time I did stop and look at him. “What’s going on here, Tommy? Has Keffers recruited you for his porn patrol?”

“I wasn’t trying to spy on you. But I did see you, that time last week, after we’d all been up in Charley’s room. There was one of these mags there, and you thought we’d all left and gone. But I came back to get my jumper, and Claire’s doors were open so I could see straight through to Charley’s room. That’s how I saw you in there, going through the magazine.”

“Well, so what? We all have to get our kicks some way.”

“You weren’t doing it for kicks. I could tell, just like I can now. It’s your face, Kath. That time in Charley’s room, you had a strange face. Like you were sad, maybe. And a bit scared.”

I jumped off the workbench, gathered up the mags and dumped them in his arms. “Here. Give these to Ruth. See if they do anything for her.”

I walked past him and out of the barn. I knew he’d be disappointed I hadn’t told him anything, but at that point I hadn’t thought things through properly myself and wasn’t ready to tell anyone. But I hadn’t minded him coming into the boiler hut after me. I hadn’t minded at all. I’d felt comforted, protected almost. I did tell him eventually, but that wasn’t until a few months later, when we went on our Norfolk trip.

I want to talk about the Norfolk trip, and all the things that happened that day, but I’ll first have to go back a bit, to give you the background and explain why it was we went.

Our first winter was just about over by then and we were all feeling much more settled. For all our little hiccups, Ruth and I had kept up our habit of rounding off the day in my room, talking over our hot drinks, and it was during one of those sessions, when we were larking around about something, that she suddenly said:

“I suppose you’ve heard what Chrissie and Rodney have been saying.”

When I said I hadn’t, she did a laugh and continued: “They’re probably just having me on. Their idea of a joke. Forget I mentioned it.”

But I could see she wanted me to drag it out of her, so I kept pressing until in the end she said in a lowered voice:

“You remember last week, when Chrissie and Rodney were away? They’d been up to this town called Cromer, up on the north Norfolk coast.”

“What were they doing there?”

“Oh, I think they’ve got a friend there, someone who used to live here. That’s not the point. The point is, they claim they saw this… person. Working there in this open-plan office. And, well, you know. They reckon this person’s a possible. For me.”

Though most of us had first come across the idea of “possibles” back at Hailsham, we’d sensed we weren’t supposed to discuss it, and so we hadn’t—though for sure, it had both intrigued and disturbed us. And even at the Cottages, it wasn’t a topic you could bring up casually. There was definitely more awkwardness around any talk of possibles than there was around, say, sex. At the same time, you could tell people were fascinated—obsessed, in some cases—and so it kept coming up, usually in solemn arguments, a world away from our ones about, say, James Joyce.

The basic idea behind the possibles theory was simple, and didn’t provoke much dispute. It went something like this. Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life. This meant, at least in theory, you’d be able to find the person you were modelled from. That’s why, when you were out there yourself—in the towns, shopping centres, transport cafés—you kept an eye out for “possibles”—the people who might have been the models for you and your friends.

Beyond these basics, though, there wasn’t much consensus. For a start, no one could agree what we were looking for when we looked for possibles. Some students thought you should be looking for a person twenty to thirty years older than yourself—the sort of age a normal parent would be. But others claimed this was sentimental. Why would there be a “natural” generation between us and our models? They could have used babies, old people, what difference would it have made? Others argued back that they’d use for models people at the peak of their health, and that’s why they were likely to be “normal parent” age. But around here, we’d all sense we were near territory we didn’t want to enter, and the arguments would fizzle out.

Then there were those questions about why we wanted to track down our models at all. One big idea behind finding your model was that when you did, you’d glimpse your future. Now I don’t mean anyone really thought that if your model turned out to be, say, a guy working at a railway station, that’s what you’d end up doing too. We all realised it wasn’t that simple. Nevertheless, we all of us, to varying degrees, believed that when you saw the person you were copied from, you’d get some insight into who you were deep down, and maybe too, you’d see something of what your life held in store.

There were some who thought it stupid to be concerned about possibles at all. Our models were an irrelevance, a technical necessity for bringing us into the world, nothing more than that. It was up to each of us to make of our lives what we could. This was the camp Ruth always claimed to side with, and I probably did too. All the same, whenever we heard reports of a possible—whoever it was for—we couldn’t help getting curious.