After that I have to do some memory tests, general intelligence tests, and some maths. I’m all right at those. Then it’s reading and writing, which Celia says we have to do, even though we both know what the results are going to be.

That’s it.

The next day I’m left in the cage, shackled up. She drives off in the morning and gets back late in the afternoon. I don’t know if she meets someone. I ask sometimes, and my questions are ignored.

The other change, which Celia has just been told about, is that I don’t have to go down to the Council building for my annual assessment. For my sixteenth birthday the Council is coming to me. Apparently I have to look my best.

“What are you trying to achieve?”

“Eh?”

“With that.” Celia indicates my head with a slight movement of hers.

I grin.

Once a month, before the assessment, I’m allowed into the cottage bathroom for a proper bath. There is hot water, which is a peaty brown color, and soap. I shave the hairs that are sprouting above my lip and on my chin. The razor is a really crummy throwaway one, and as weapons go I have decided a pencil is more lethal. Celia cuts my hair once a month, keeping it short, but today I’ve shaved off the sides to give myself a Mohican.

“You should shave it all off. You’d look like a monk.”

“A look that says pure and holy and searching for the Truth?”

“A look that says meek and mild. A look that says novice.”

“That’s not really me.”

“It would be best not to antagonize them.”

Celia wants me to do well. It will reflect well on her, I guess.

I sit at the table. “Now what?”

“Now I wait here while you go back in there and shave that mess off.”

“You’ve no sense of humor.”

“You do look absurdly funny, I’ll give you that, but it would help things along if you shaved it all off voluntarily.”

I go back into the bathroom. The reflection of me is strange. The hair is okay, a tufty Mohican. But I don’t recognize myself. I guess I’m not used to looking at myself in a mirror. I watch myself stroking my hair, see my scarred right hand brush it back, but the face doesn’t look like me. I know it is me ’cause of the scar on my cheekbone that Jessica gave me, and there’s the scar near my ear, white against the black specks of my shaved scalp, where Niall got me. But my face looks different from the way I thought it looked. Older. Way older. My eyes are large and black, and even when I smile there’s no hint of a smile in them. They look hollowed out, the black triangles rotating slowly. I lean into the mirror and try to see where my pupils end and my irises begin and my forehead hits the glass. I step back to the far end of the bathroom, turn away, and turn back quickly, trying to catch something, a light perhaps. I don’t catch anything.

“What’s taking so long?” Celia shouts.

I pick up the razor and then put it down.

A minute later I walk out.

She laughs and then stops herself and says, “Now you’re being ridiculous. Take them out.”

I grin at her and feel my eyebrow. I’ve pierced it with three small metal rings, put a metal ring in my right nostril and a bigger one in the left corner of my bottom lip.

“It’s all part of the punk look.” I run my fingers across the choker. “It would be better with safety pins.”

“Where did you get that thing in your lip?”

“They’re all from the plug chain.”

“Why don’t you attach the plug as well? You might as well look totally mad.”

“You’re just too old to understand.”

“Can we go back to my original point? What are you trying to achieve?”

I look out of the window to the hills and sky, pale gray high clouds leaching the color from everything.

“Well?”

“Freedom from persecution.” I say it flatly.

Silence.

“Do you think I’ll ever get that?”

Nothing moves outside; the heather on the hills is undisturbed by wind, the clouds are motionless.

Later on in the evening I do a drawing. I use pencil, as we’ve run out of ink and I’ve gone off charcoal. Pencil is okay. I’ve drawn the animals and plants I see around here. Celia has put a few aside to show the Councilors. I am tempted to ask, “What are you trying to achieve with that?” but I don’t bother, as I’ll just get a blank.

Tonight I’m drawing Celia. She hates me drawing her, which is all part of the fun. Warts and all is my approach. Take no prisoners. She’ll burn it afterward. She always burns the portraits of her. I don’t take this as an artistic insult; it’s the original that’s the problem.

I do self-portraits, but just of my right hand. The melted skin is like runs of thick oil paint ending in a rounded, not quite solidified blob. The skin on the back of my hand between the smooth runs is cracked and lifting like an old painting too. My hand is art.

I did a drawing of my hand holding a long, slender dagger a few weeks ago. I thought Celia was going to faint, she was holding her breath so long. I scrunched the paper up, saying it was “rubbish” and threw it on the fire before she could stop me. I’ve not done it again; it wasn’t that funny.

My landscapes really are rubbish. I can’t get them right at all, and my buildings are boringly bad. I’ve drawn the cage, though. I captured that. I caught its sucked-out blackness, a holding-something-down-ness. I know that cage so well. It was my best piece. I told Celia we should show it to the Council. She didn’t say anything and I’ve not seen the picture since. I guess she burned it.

“They’ll be here late morning,” she says as I draw. “I’ll weigh you, photograph you before they get here.”

“Nervous?”

She doesn’t reply, and I lean away, anticipating a slap, but she doesn’t take the bait.

“I won’t mess up. Don’t worry. I’ll be a good boy and answer all their questions nicely. And I won’t spit at them until the end.”

Celia sighs.

We’re quiet again, me trying to draw her hair. I think it’s thinning; perhaps it’s worry.

“Will you be in the room when they do the assessment?”

“What do you think?”

“Probably not . . . Definitely not.”

“Then why ask?”

“Just making conversation.”

“Then make it better.”

I draw her mouth at that point. She has a great sneer that somehow makes her big lips seem less ugly and more interesting. I’d like to draw her standing to attention outside my cage, holding the key, with the look she sometimes has on her face, the look that’s almost pity. The reason she does this job, I think.

“Well?” she asks.

“Well what?”

“I know you want to ask something.”

How can she tell that?

“Umm. Well. I was wondering . . . How come you got the job of being my jailer?”

“Teacher and guardian.”

“There weren’t many applicants, I guess.” I’m finishing off her mouth now, but the downward curve of the original has softened.

She turns to me, disturbing the position she’s been holding.

“I believe I was their first choice for the post.”

“Their only choice, you mean.”

I wait, but she’s giving nothing away.

“And your life is so empty that sitting in the middle of nowhere acting as jailer for an innocent child must seem pretty rewarding.”

She’s actually beginning to smile at this.

“And I bet the pay isn’t that great.”

She nods a little.

“Imprisoning, beating, physically and mentally scarring a boy who isn’t yet sixteen years old . . . a boy who has never done anything wrong . . . they’re all the plus points of the job.”

“Yes,” she says. “They are all plus points.”

The smile has gone, but the sneer hasn’t returned. She resumes her previous pose and doesn’t look at me as she says, “Marcus killed my sister.”

Her sister must be on the list. I don’t know Celia’s surname. I’ve asked before but apparently it’s not relevant.