57

They pedalled as hard as they could down the driveway, not looking back until the house had vanished round the bend in the road behind them.

Daniel gripped the handlebars, the air whooshing electric around him.

‘Hey!’ shouted Rosie and, when he glanced round and realized she was struggling to keep up, he slowed and waited for her. Eventually, he looked back to see her standing in the road, her hands on the handlebars as if the bike was the only thing keeping her up.

‘I don’t feel so good,’ she said as he pulled up beside her. When he touched her, she was trembling like a baby bird. Blood was coming from her nose again, splashing in three big drops on to the road.

Daniel held her until she had stopped shaking.

‘I’ll walk if you can steer,’ he said, and he made her sit on her bike as he gripped the handlebars and pulled her, his own bike ticking beside him, and her coughing and shaking as the wheels turned.

There were stars in every puddle that they passed.

‘I hate being like this,’ she said.

‘It’s fine.’

‘No it’s not. Nothing is.’

They kept going for some time, not speaking, until Rosie summoned enough strength to say something. ‘He’s not like your father,’ she said. ‘They’re not the same at all. That man was dead. He said so.’

‘Not all of him was.’ When she opened her mouth to say something, Daniel got there first. ‘Do you feel ready to ride a bit more? It’s late and we need to get you home.’ He pointed at Cambridge in front of them, glowing in the distance like some fairy forest. ‘We’ve still got a way to go.’

Rosie nodded. ‘Yes, in a moment. I think I might be able to.’

‘Perfect.’

When Rosie decided she had enough strength to start peddling for herself, they speeded up a little, Daniel keeping close to her, watching her as she wobbled, his heart lurching whenever she did. But they managed to keep going.

‘Daniel, how are we going to find the flask?’ asked Rosie as they cycled down the street towards her house.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are all of Lawson’s memories really burned out?’

‘I think they are, yes. I can’t find anything inside me at all.’

Rosie braked. Slipped her feet off the pedals on to the road to keep her steady.

‘I can’t make the fit again. Not now. That last time . . . something happened. I’m too scared to try.’

‘We’ll find the flask another way.’

‘What way?’

‘I’ll figure it out. There’s someone I know who might be able to help.’

‘Who?’

‘You don’t know them.’

‘But—’

She stopped when the front door to her house opened and they both realized how loud their voices must have been in the still night.

‘ROSIE?’ It was her mother, backlit by the light in the hallway until she started trotting down the steps to the driveway. ‘Rosie, where have you been?’ Her voice rang out as Rosie hissed at Daniel to go.

‘I’ll find the flask. I will,’ he said and started to peddle.

He heard them arguing in the street. Her mother’s worried voice ringing shrill and excited round the houses. Daniel found it strangely comforting. The love that Rosie’s mother had for her, coming out in all its anger, seemed so clean and pure and undiluted. He stopped and hid in an alley and listened in secret to them arguing until they went inside.

As he cycled slowly, wending through the streets, he pretended that his father was waiting at home for him, ready to be angry too. But he knew there was only his aunt, and however angry she might be it would not feel the same at all because it wouldn’t be his father’s love ringing out at him the way he craved.

When he did reach home, all the lights were off and it shocked him for a moment. He wondered if his aunt was even there. He crept upstairs and saw the line of white light beneath her bedroom door disappear with a tiny click.

Daniel stood there, waiting to see if she might appear. But she didn’t. Suddenly, he wanted her to. He wanted to go and bang on her door and demand it. But after the red surge in him had disappeared he found himself thinking that it was just enough for now that she was there, that the light had been on and then gone off with a simple-sounding click as soon as he had come home. For the first time since she had arrived in his life, he was glad that she was here. It was like a lens had been put in front of his eyes and he was seeing everything more clearly, imagining the world from her point of view and not just his own. He wondered why it had happened. Where it was coming from. He tried to trace his thinking back to its source, stopping when he remembered how Rosie had hugged him and told him he wouldn’t be alone. Somehow, she had unlocked his heart to a love in the world that he hadn’t been able to see before.

But, as he got himself ready for bed, he soon got to thinking about his dad again, feeling guilty for even thinking about his aunt in a way his father wouldn’t have ever wanted him to. So he buried the good thoughts about her deep down inside him until being in the house without his dad felt wrong, just like it had done for the last few days. Not standing in the bathroom brushing his teeth. Not sitting on the loo. Not even standing in his bedroom about to undress.

‘We’re not staying here,’ Daniel said to his reflection in the mirror on his bedside table.

He went to the shed in the garden and sat in the armchair he and his father had carried there some months ago when the snow had been thick on the ground, which seemed like an age ago.

The seat was lumpy. The broken springs creaked as Daniel tried to get comfortable until he was looking up past his grasshopper-sized thighs at the wall in front of him.

A line of empty bottles was webbed together on a rickety shelf.

There were magazines fat with damp piled on the floor.

A pair of shears was hanging from a nail, like the skeleton of some ancient bird.

The shed was a place full of forgotten, meaningless things, bereft of purpose and left to rot.

And it was here that Daniel managed to fall asleep.

When he opened his eyes, it was still dark and he knew he had dozed off, the crick in his neck driven in deep like a nail. His hands were cold and he hid them under his sweatshirt in the warm beside his stomach. He noodled the springs in the chair to try and get more comfortable and then stopped when a light played across the window, drawing a white stripe across the inside of the shed.

At first he thought it must be his aunt, with a torch. He held his breath, trying to listen. Nothing. Not a sound. He crept to the window and pulled apart the cobwebs. The glass was milky with moonlit dirt, but he could see the shape of a man standing in the garden, the light flashing as he moved, looking for something.

Suddenly, the figure stopped and turned to look right at him, the light from the torch shining into his face. But Daniel knew who it was immediately and flung open the door, running into the white tunnel of light.

But then the torch suddenly flipped up and pointed at the sky because his father was off balance, falling backwards into a deep dark sinkhole that was opening in the lawn behind him. Daniel rushed across the grass until he was teetering on the edge of the hole. He could see his father and the torch falling into the black bottomless pit so he jumped in too, feet first, falling straight and true like an arrow being fired downwards. As he looked up, the wind rushing in his ears, he saw people standing around the edge of the hole. His aunt. Bennett. Rosie. James. They were looking down and shouting at him to come back. But Daniel couldn’t stop as their voices rang round and round the dark black walls of the sinkhole . . .

Daniel woke up, blinking in the early morning sunlight coming through the window of the shed.

The phone Mason had given him was ringing in his trouser pocket, working still despite its cracked screen. His finger hovered over the answer button. But he didn’t press it.

When the ringtone stopped, he sighed with relief, but a moment later the phone started up again. He turned it to mute and hid it back in a pocket.

When he closed the shed door behind him, Daniel’s hands were shaking as they lifted the latch, then clinked it down. He turned round to stare at the lawn where the sinkhole had opened in his dream and then he started walking across the green springy turf towards the house.

As he got closer to the back door, he realized his aunt was watching him through the kitchen window, her forearms up to their elbows in a thick crust of foam as she did the washing-up.

She didn’t say a word as he opened the back door and walked through the kitchen and went upstairs.