I open the front door and step outside and the cool wind brushes my face, almost caressingly. As I stand looking out into the darkness, it’s like I can hear the pulse of everything out there. I remember the Prayer Tree and all those names and scratchings, every one of them with their own story, and I wonder where they all are now. Is Bronnie still in love with any of those boys? Does Jason still have so much hate? Do any of them still think of their time on the Jellicoe Road?

I’m about to go inside when I notice that at the bottom of the steps of the House is my bike, which had disappeared from behind Hannah’s house. I look out again, wondering if whoever has returned it is out there watching.

When I walk back inside, I pass the common-room and I find myself looking for a bible. Matthew, chapter ten, verse twenty-six. Whatever is now covered up will be uncovered and every secret will be made known. I wonder where such a message belongs amongst the Bronnies and Jasons of the world.

I go to sleep thinking of Hannah’s character, Webb, who speaks of things I sometimes dream, and suddenly I’m sitting in the tree with the boy. He leans towards me and speaks but no sound comes out of his mouth and I ask him over and over again to say it louder, until I exhaust myself. So I read his lips, my eyes straining, every part of my senses aching, until I’m miming his words, and when I wake, Jessa and Raffaela are standing at the end of my bed, staring.

“Was I shouting?” I ask, my voice croaky.

“You were crying.”

“The whole time?”

Jessa shakes her head. “Your mouth was moving but nothing was coming out,” she says.

“What was I saying?”

Raffaela shrugs. “I’ll get you some water.”

She leaves the room and Jessa sits on my bed. After a moment or two I know that she’s worked out what I was mouthing.

“Taylor,” she says quietly, confused. “You said that your mother wants to come home.”

Chapter 10

I’m dreaming. I know I’m dreaming because I’m in a tunnel and in reality I don’t do tunnels. And down in the tunnel I smell something vile. I can’t identify it, but it consumes my whole being and I start to choke, unable to breathe. But then a hand grabs me and pulls me out and I know it’s the boy in the tree in my dreams and he tries to resuscitate me, but his mouth is rotting and his breath is foul. And I scream and I scream, but nothing comes out.

Thoughts of my mother begin to consume my every moment and they sweep me into an overwhelming feeling of bleakness and a desperate need for Hannah. Sometimes in the middle of the night, Raffaela knocks on my door when she sees the light coming from my room but I ignore her. I just sit up and try hard to stay awake because sleeping isn’t safe anymore. I find myself Googling any name I remember my mother using. It was never the same name for long and that probably had to do with the profession she was in. She tried to change my name once or twice, convinced that someone was after us.

“They’ll take you away from me,” she’d say. “They’ve done it before.”

But I didn’t want my name changed. It was all I had.

The cat is no more settled than when I brought him home but I refuse to let him go. Sometimes I head to Hannah’s place straight after school and try to get some rest there or I sit up in the attic and read. In this room I feel comforted. I like the box-like quality of it, the way the roof slopes, the perfectly cut square in the floor, the trapdoor that blocks out the world below, the skylight that on a clear night allows you to see every star you would want to see in the galaxy. Sometimes after we had been working all day on the house, Hannah and I would sit up here and just talk. She never spoke much about her family except a few times in this room. If I asked her anything about them she’d just say they were all gone and that if she allowed herself to give in to the whole sadness of it, she’d never ever be able to operate like a normal person again.

“I’ve been in that void,” she told me once. “Don’t you ever give in to it.”

But I want to give in to it sometimes, only because I’m tired and the feeling that I’ve had for a while—that something is hunting me down—becomes all-consuming and I’m frightened that one morning there will not be enough to keep me going. Except maybe the pages I’m holding in my hands. They comfort me, these characters, like they’re my best friends, too. Like Jude felt when he returned that second year and they were waiting for him. Give me a sign, I keep on saying to whoever can hear me in my head. Give me a sign.

But most of the time I wonder how much Hannah is a part of this story and this school. Was she the leader of a community who thought she was weak and usurped her first opportunity they got? Did she experience a coup at the hands of a Richard-like, fascist-loving, backstabbing creep? And where did she get this idea that there was peace between the Townies and Cadets and us?

I find some chapters to read that seem intact. I’m running out of them because so many are half-finished or written in a scrawl that I can’t quite understand. There’s this part of me that doesn’t want to deal with the fact that one of these characters is lost to them and I’m frightened that I will come across the chapter where they find him, because I know, deep down, that it’s not going to turn out the way I want. That someone in this story is not going to get out of it alive. It’s how I feel when I think of the boy in the tree in my dreams. Is he there to prepare me for something so devastating that it will lodge me in that void that Hannah spoke about?

Just when I’m about to work out a sequence of pages, I hear a window smash and I jump. I had locked the front door on purpose. Because Hannah’s house without her didn’t seem so safe anymore.

Quietly I crawl to the hole in the floor and peer all the way to the bottom. I see nothing but shadows and hear nothing but the sounds of breathing. I want to call out but something frightens me into silence and I sit and wait. Listening. I hear the heavy sound of footsteps on the wooden stairs as they make their way to the second floor. My heart is rattling uncontrollably. I reassure myself that nothing out here can be too frightening but I’m anxious all the same.

There seems to be nowhere to hide except under the stretcher bed in the middle of the room. The space beneath it is tiny, but I squeeze myself under and take a deep breath and then there’s total silence. From where I’m lying, I can see half the manuscript sitting on the floor. The other half’s with me. I reach out my hand until it aches, trying to touch it to drag it over, but as I do, my shoulder lifts the stretcher bed above me. I drop my arm and the stretcher bed hits the floorboards. Suddenly the footsteps begin again, slowly ascending.

Whoever it is has reached the second landing. I can imagine them standing there, looking up at the hole in the ceiling, taking hold of the ladder—one step, two steps, three steps, four. And there it is. The back of a head appears through the trapdoor but I can’t quite make out who it is. He lifts himself up and then crouches to pick up the pages on the floor and I know what his next step will be. To turn around and look in the only place there is in the room to hide.

I know it’s the Brigadier. I know because of that thumping sound inside of me and the only option I have, apart from being caught, is to lift the stretcher bed across my head and just throw it. Quietly I roll up the papers in my hand and stick them down my jeans and I get ready. The footsteps come closer and the boot stops right in front of my nose. I can hardly breathe but I need to move. Just do it, I tell myself. Just do it and bolt!

“Are you okay under there?” I hear him ask. He uses a soft tone, like he’s trying to entice me out with the good-guy approach. But good guys don’t smash windows to get into someone’s house and good guys don’t freak me out as much as this man does.