I dream about broken necks, and old diaries, and the phone box down at South Beach. I wake with a start. It’s six a.m. and all I can hear is Mum’s breathing, the cardboard I’d gaffer taped to the window has flattened all the other sounds. Carefully, I slip out from under her arm and I click the door shut behind me. She doesn’t wake up. I run all the way down the street and across the bridge, down to where Boogie is. I’m not even tired, the anger is coiling inside of me, ready to spring.

He’s there when I pick up the phone.

‘You lied to me!’ I scream at him.

‘I never lied. I’m . . . I’m the only person who understands you . . .’ he stutters.

‘Cut the crap, Booger,’ I snarl.

‘My name is Boogie!’ he snarls back.

‘Your name isn’t Boogie. It’s Robert Granger. Or Bobby. Or Booger. My mum was the only one who ever called you Boogie.’

‘Judy was the only one who ever mattered,’ he spits back, his voice cold.

I laugh now, that manic, awful laugh. It tears at my throat and leaves an ugly metallic taste in my mouth.

‘Oh, right. And look how you treated her! You promised me you wouldn’t haunt me. Remember condition number three? No haunting! But you’ve haunted me my whole life, through my mother, because of that message you left her in your diary! You haunted both of us, and you broke her so badly!’ I scream at him. I’m crying now. Worse than crying. It’s like my body is more sobs than flesh. Those sobs seem solid. Boogie’s silent for a while, and I think my crying is so loud that it’s echoing. It’s not until a few minutes have passed that I realise that the echo I can hear is Boogie. He’s crying too.

‘I couldn’t think straight, from all the pain,’ he says, his voice strangled through the sobs. ‘I didn’t want to break her, I just wanted her to understand how I felt . . .’

The rage springs loose from inside of me as the sky starts to bleed red through the softening dark.

‘Well done. You transferred that pain pretty damned well! Bravo! And what was the whole bullshit about McGinty? The doctors told me that Margery had a heart attack running for the bus, they could prove it. What the hell was that flashback you showed me?’

Boogie stutters again.

‘It . . . it . . . I wasn’t lying. I was certain that had happened. McGinty’s a monster, you know. Everyone knows that. Just look at him.’

‘You were certain, or you imagined it, the way you imagined you were dark haired and popular and handsome? Tell me the truth, Boogie!’

He makes a strangled sort of sound.

‘Real life is full of fakes and bullshit, Kirra! What you can imagine . . . that’s the closest thing to truth there is.’

I slam the receiver against the wall and return it to my ear.

‘So why the hell did you get me to do all those things for you, to find those bloody clues that never existed? I stalked McGinty, and swam out to the bombies for you, and dug in the sand dunes that almost collapsed on top of me. You told me that would free you, Boogie! I almost died for nothing!’

His voice is small and cracked when he replies.

‘That was the point,’ he whispers. ‘I’m so lonely here, and you’re so much like Judy, you have that same glow. You glow yellow, Kirra. I’m so lonely here I could die.’

He makes a sad, snorty laugh at his own black joke, and I drop the receiver from my ear so it hangs limply from the cord. I watch it sway softly, and it reminds me of Boogie, hanging from his neck.

It hits me.

Boogie never wanted me to help him.

He wanted me there with him.

I double over and vomit all over the floor of the booth.

As I start to walk home the phone rings plaintively after me.

How dare he.

How bloody dare he.

I turn to face the sound.

‘Go to hell!’ I scream at him.

I’ve never meant those words so literally in my life.