Deirdre was five years old when she first met Gal.

‘Galahad,’ she repeated slowly when his father introduced him. It was a big word, a storybook one. And she had never met a boy her own age before.

Mrs Dark was standing behind her with hands resting lightly on Deirdre’s shoulders. In those days, things between Deirdre and her grandmother were simple. Deirdre adored her. She had not yet learned to fear. That came later. Mrs Dark leant down and placed her cheek against Deirdre’s, as if she were the same height. Sometimes Deirdre felt that, in her heart of hearts, her grandmother was just a little girl, the same age as Deirdre. Only, Mrs Dark knew everything; Deirdre nothing.

‘Do you know who Galahad was?’ asked her grandmother.

‘A knight in shining armour?’ suggested Deirdre.

‘He was the perfect knight. He found the Holy Grail. He was the only one of all King Arthur’s knights who was worthy, because he was the only one whose heart was pure. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God . . . But he was illegitimate. Lancelot’s love child. This little boy is my godson, Deirdre. They let me name him, so I chose Galahad. It was what you might call a private joke.’

Deirdre was used to not understanding what her grandmother said to her. Mrs Dark could never have been accused of talking down to children. She had a peculiar way of talking to Deirdre as if she were a contemporary. So actually there were two possibilities. Either Mrs Dark was really five, or Deirdre was really her grandmother’s age.

Still, Deirdre knew what her grandmother was trying to teach her. She was telling Deirdre that this boy, that all boys, were of no account. But Deirdre was not listening.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Hello, Deedee,’ said Gal. It was as much as he could manage of her name – for hers was difficult too – but it stuck. ‘I’ve got a rabbit,’ he added.

‘All right if I bring the bunny in?’ asked Gal’s father.

Mrs Dark smiled brightly and made a welcoming gesture. She didn’t ordinarily like visitors, but she seemed so pleased about these ones that she could hardly stop smiling. She was shifting her weight restlessly from one foot to the other, a girlish habit of hers. Gal’s father had left the cage outside the door of the flat; he brought it in and put it down in the middle of the lounge-room carpet. Gal opened the cage door and out limped the rabbit.

Deirdre held her breath. The rabbit was the most wonder­­ful thing she had ever seen. Deirdre was an indoors child. Animals were a kind of miracle to her. They went by themselves, with­out batteries or cords or any need to wind them. How she admired this boy Galahad for being a keeper of rabbits.

‘Do you know all about rabbits?’ said Deirdre.

‘Just this one,’ said Gal modestly.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Fierce Bad Rabbit,’ said Gal.

‘Can I pat him?’

Gal nodded.

The rabbit, who was soft, warm and tolerant, took no notice of Deirdre whatsoever. It seemed to exist in its own world; it brought a meadow with it.

So did Gal.

Even at five, he seemed to dwell so far back, so deep beneath the surface, that it was impossible to reach him by the usual means. It was almost as if he was not really present, or dwelling simultaneously in another dimension that took most of his attention. Or as if he really belonged in another story.

And yet, to be looked at or smiled at by Gal was to feel that no one had ever really seen you, or liked you, in all your life before that moment. He had a way, when he smiled, of welling up through his eyes, as if the cup of himself were running over, and as if that cup were full of goodness. It was as if he knew a secret, a very important one, and as if the secret gave him a reason to be happy, no matter what.

Mrs Dark knew a secret, too. Deirdre had always known that. But her secret made the whole world sad.

‘If he could stay here with you for a while,’ Gal’s father was saying as they played with the rabbit, ‘just while I find my feet, I would be so grateful. Aunty Lainey would love to have him but she’s really too frail. Anyway, he doesn’t remember her – she hasn’t been out to the farm in years. And he’ll see her round the building, I suppose. You must see her all the time.’

Mrs Dark just smiled.

‘There is nothing to be grateful for,’ she said. ‘He is my godchild. He can stay as long as he needs to.’

And she looked at Gal as he played on the floor with Deirdre and the rabbit. She had the oddest expression on her face. The casual observer might have mistaken it for tenderness. But someone who knew her better might have thought she looked as if she simply couldn’t believe her luck.

Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.

‘Funny to think they’ll be starting school soon,’ said Gal’s father.

Mrs Dark frowned suddenly. Deirdre glanced up at her, and thought that she looked like a little girl who had placed her hands over her ears so that she couldn’t hear a rule she did not want to obey.

Gal’s father built a hutch for the rabbit down the back before he went away. Then he went, and Gal stayed.

For as long as she could remember, Deirdre had longed for another child to play with. Of course, if given the choice, she would have chosen a girl. She would have been shy of any stranger, but a boy presented extra unfamiliarities.

And Gal was not just any boy, or even a boy who had grown up, like Deirdre, in a block of flats. He was used to a very different life from the one Deirdre led with her grandmother at Corbenic. He had lived all his life on a small farm down the valley, where he was supervised, casually, by an extended family of aunts and uncles and older cousins, none of whom paid him much attention, although none were unkind. He was used to going barefoot and climbing trees and looking after animals. His mother had walked out when he was a baby, his father drifted in and out of his life, a pleasant man who seemed incapable of staying in one place for very long. All in all Gal had an air, even at five, of cheerful, lonely independence, as if he expected nothing from no one.

Gal had interesting scars – on his knee, on his elbow and under his right eye, and a hair-raising history of accidents he seemed lucky to have come through intact. He was not afraid of dogs. And he could make friends with anything.

Even a little creature as wild and shy as Deirdre.

In those days, the days when Deirdre and Galahad were five, Corbenic was still a going concern. It was not the thriving establishment it had been in Great-grandfather’s day, of course. Its glory days were over – half the flats could not be let. Still, there were tenants, and the tenants paid rent – notes folded up in envelopes and pushed under Mrs Dark’s door – and Mrs Dark paid a cleaner to vacuum the halls and a painter to paint the walls and a handyman to fix the holes in the roof – although her upkeep was always grudging and minimal, more a patching up than fixing. She seemed to have a grudge against the building, to resent it and any money that had to be spent on it. Deirdre understood that even at five. Children and animals were generally not allowed. But the proprietor’s granddaughter and godchild and his rabbit were an exception.

And so it was that Corbenic began to be Deirdre’s and Gal’s domain.

It happened tentatively at first. They liked each other, instinctively, from the moment they met, but it took a while to work out how to play together. At first the restrictions discouraged them. All play had to be as quiet as possible, so that the tenants would not be disturbed. And of course, although the space indoors was vast, no running or laughing was permitted. There was outside with the rabbit, but apart from the rabbit hutch the backyard was an unpromising place for play. It was bare and stony and uneven and it doubled as a car park. Once, long ago, there had been rosebushes planted along the sides of the buildings, but, strangely, Mrs Dark had had them pulled out and their roots poisoned. Deirdre and Gal were too young to play there unsupervised and somehow Deirdre’s grandmother, standing at the window, robbed them of ideas. Deirdre did not even have play clothes; she was always dressed in pleated skirts and cardigans and tights.

Deirdre was uncomfortable doing the things that seemed like good ideas to Gal – for example, seeing who could jump farthest from the third step of the fire escape or trying to catch insects. And Gal was perplexed by paper dolls.

Then one day they happened upon something they both liked doing, and Corbenic opened its heart to them.

It must have been at about the time that Mrs Dark began her renovations, because Deirdre remembered being with Gal while her grandmother talked to a builder.

The builder, thought Deirdre, had rather an odd look on his face.

‘How do you mean, you don’t want it to end, Mrs Dark?’ he asked.

How do you mean, you don’t want it to end?

‘What’s down here?’ said Gal to Deirdre.

They were all standing in a kind of intersection in the building. There was a hall in front of them and one behind them. And there were halls leading to the right and left. The hall behind them led back the way they had come, to Deirdre’s grandmother’s flat and, beyond it, down the stairs, to the main entrance. The hall in front of them led eventually to a stairway that took you down to the back entrance and the yard with the rabbit hutch. The hall to the right of them ended quite quickly, with a door to a flat marked 11. But the hall to the left of them didn’t end; or at least, it ended in a darkness that obscured what lay beyond.

‘I don’t know,’ said Deirdre, but Gal had already ventured some steps away from her. He was always so fearless, so optimistic; he acted on his impulses. But Deirdre always hesitated. She glanced at her grandmother. Mrs Dark was talking to the builder. She seemed caught up in the discussion. But she always knew what Deirdre was doing, and Deirdre knew she would be stopped if it were not allowed. So rather than interrupting her, she followed Gal.

The hall ended in a blank wall and two more halls, one to their right and one to their left. The one to their right was dark, and seemed to end in some kind of storeroom; they could see the shadows of broom handles behind the frosted glass panes. The one to their left was dimly lit with soft electric lights along the wall on either side. At the end was a door. It looked like the door to a flat, but oddly, it wasn’t numbered and it was slightly ajar. A warm light came from the other side.

Gal looked back at her, delighted. He crept curiously towards the door. Deirdre followed him. They were about to peek inside when suddenly an elderly lady – some twenty years older, perhaps, than Deirdre’s grandmother – appeared from the other side. She was dressed to go out, in a hat and coat and gloves, with a handbag over the crook of her arm, and seemed in a mild hurry. Her silver hair was done in a neat French roll, and she had large dark eyes and was wearing a bright shade of lipstick. An aura of perfume floated around her. When she saw them she was startled. Then her face softened and she smiled at them.

‘Well!’ she said. Her smile was warm, eager even, but there was something sad in it. ‘It seems I have two visitors!’

Gal and Deirdre stared at her, big-eyed.

‘Two special visitors,’ repeated the old lady. ‘I must give you both a present –’ and she nipped back inside her flat, where they could hear her opening a drawer and rustling through it. The door was half open now and they could see a beautiful, richly furnished flat with an air of the exotic to it, painted screens and embroidered shawls spread over tables and chairs. And everything inside seemed old. The air was filled with perfume. ‘Here we are,’ said the old lady, returning. ‘You must be Deirdre,’ she said warmly, handing Deirdre a card. ‘And you,’ she added, looking at Gal with unmistakeable love, ‘must be Galahad.’ She handed him a card too, then said, ‘I must be going. I will be late for Mass.’

She shut the door to her flat, touched them both lightly on their hair and their cheeks, and set off almost guiltily up the hall.

‘Who are you, Mrs Old Lady?’ ventured Gal.

The old woman turned back and laughed sweetly. But still there was that tinge of sadness.

‘You must call me Aunty, Galahad,’ she said. ‘Aunty Elaine.’

The cards she had given them were French holy cards. Deirdre’s had a picture of Mary, Galahad’s of Jesus. They both had the same little motto written on them in French; it wasn’t until many years later that Gal had enough French to make it out. Ma vocation, c’est l’amour. My vocation is love.

They did not see what happened when the old woman passed Mrs Dark and the builder – that took place further along the halls ahead of them. So they did not see the old woman’s deference and Deirdre’s grandmother’s cold hostility. And being five, they did not wonder at the fact that the two women lived in the same building without speaking to each other, or even seeing each other unless it happened by accident. Or why Deirdre had never even been introduced to her.

No, it wasn’t until much later that they understood.

She died not long afterwards. Her flat was never let again. Gradually, through the years after her death, Mrs Dark collected all the best of its furniture and ornaments and crammed them into her own.

She felt entitled to it, considering it was her father who had bought it all.

But that was not the only secret contained within the walls and the doors and the halls of Corbenic. In fact it was only the beginning.

After that they spent most of their time exploring. Deirdre could never work out why her grandmother didn’t seem to mind. Most things were not allowed; Deirdre’s grandmother said the word no more often than any other. And yet she allowed them the run of the building. Perhaps she was already too obsessed with her building plans to give much thought to anything else. Or perhaps, perversely, she wanted the thing she most feared to happen. Or perhaps she needed an excuse for what she already knew she was going to do.

Every day the builders would invade Corbenic, starting work in the early morning and leaving mid-afternoon. They were cheerful men in overalls with belts full of tools, and conversation punctuated by short bursts of laughter, and Deirdre and Galahad liked them. Often there would be deliveries of timber, bricks, mortar, boxes of nails and roofing materials – all manner of interesting things, arriving in trucks that had to inch their way carefully down the side laneway and out to the back. And during the day you could hear the irregular sounds of their work – hammering, drilling, sawing, the sudden clang of tools dropped – in a slightly muffled way, all over the building.

For – although she could not find tenants for half of the flats as it was, and although the existing building needed renovating – Deirdre’s grandmother had decided to have a large new wing built on to the back.

Deirdre and Gal were too young to understand how strange that was.

There had always been a good deal of land behind Corbenic. In Great-grandfather’s time there had been a landscaped garden where the original guests had strolled and sat, and even a grass tennis court for them to play on; later this had become a car park in front of a neglected wilderness.

Now it was as if Corbenic was having a child.

The builders were friendly. Every time they saw the children they joked with them, and they gave them nicknames – they called Deirdre Princess, and Galahad Pup. But although they often passed the men in the hall as they came inside to use the bathroom or make a cup of tea, the children were not allowed onto the building site. So they explored the old building instead.

One of their favourite places was the gap between Corbenic and the next building in the street. Between the two was a narrow paved path, mossy and mysterious, like the secret border to another world. It was not accessible from the front, only from the yard near where Fierce Bad Rabbit lived, and nobody, except perhaps a plumber or builder, had any reason at all to go there. There were gurgling pipes snaking down the wall and mysterious grated drains beneath them. And near the corner of the outside wall, a little door led to a kind of cave, half inside and half outside, which cut into the side of the building. The builders used it as a storeroom, and it was one such builder, opening the door and bending to throw a pile of canvas inside, who alerted them to its possibilities.

‘This’d make a top cubbyhouse for you two,’ he said, looking a little enviously through the door. It was almost too low and too small for him to fit through.

He left it ajar invitingly, winked at them, and went back to work.

Deirdre and Galahad looked at each other. Then they went over to look.

Peeking inside, they saw in the dim light an alluring jumble of paint tins, tools, rolled-up leftover sections of linoleum, insulation material and folded sheets of canvas. The doorway, though awkward for a grown-up, was the perfect height for a five-year-old child. They entered, charmed, and found that the dim little room was as warm as a tea cosy, or Fierce Bad Rabbit’s flank. This was because it shared a wall with the room that housed Corbenic’s hot water system. But the warmth seemed magical.

It was as if they had found a house within a house, especially for them.

Galahad seemed moved. It was as though he had just been given the Christmas present he had always wanted. His eyes glowing, he gazed around him, his head full of plans. If the room was magically warm, he was more so, the sheer living hopeful light of him spilling out like sunshine through his eyes.

And suddenly, looking at him, happy in his happiness, Deirdre’s heart overflowed and she said, ‘I love you, Gal.’

Gal looked at her, brought suddenly out of his dream. For a moment his expression was mysterious and there was pain in it.

Nobody has noticed him except me, thought Deirdre in a flash of understanding. He is not special to anyone except me. And she loved him so much, she found this astonishing. Why didn’t the whole world love him?

‘I love you too, Deedee,’ he said gravely, and they threw their arms around each other briefly, like two puppies tumbling over one another in a basket. Then they began to explore their cave.

That night, when Deirdre’s grandmother was putting her to bed, Deirdre said to her, ‘I love Gal.’ She adored her grandmother and wanted to share everything with her. And she had not yet learned how important it was to hide such things. ‘I love him,’ she said again, because saying it made her feel happy.

‘I know,’ said her grandmother quickly, as if to prevent her from saying it again.

And then an expression crossed her face that frightened Deirdre so deeply, it was as if the light in the room suddenly dimmed. All at once, she knew what a mistake she had made in telling her.

And yet she did not know what she had done wrong. How was it that Mrs Dark could misunderstand so completely? Mrs Dark thought Deirdre meant that now she loved Gal instead of her – Deirdre could see it all over her face. She seemed to think that Deirdre could only love one person, that there was no room in her heart for any more. Dismayed, Deirdre opened her mouth to explain – although she hardly knew how to begin – but before she could get a word out her grandmother’s expression changed again and she snapped, contradicting herself, ‘Don’t be silly. You don’t love him. You don’t know what love is.’

Deirdre felt as if she had been slapped. She stared, her eyes round. Her grandmother no longer looked hurt. Now her face was harsh, but underneath the harshness was fear.

‘That’s not love,’ her grandmother went on scornfully. ‘Not real love. Real love is what I have for you, Deirdre. It’s not the easy feeling you might conceive for some little urchin, some little lost puppy you pick up off the street and like playing games with. You will never find my kind of love again, believe me. Certainly not from any boy. I am the only one who will ever love you with a true love, an unselfish love. Boys are not capable of such a thing.’

Deirdre was confused. She had heard her grandmother on this theme before and of course she did not doubt her grandmother’s love. She had looked after her when Deirdre’s own mother had run away and left her, as Deirdre had been told many times. And Deirdre’s father had never even been worth mentioning. Of course her grandmother loved her. But was it really true that what she felt for Gal was not love – and that no one but her grandmother was capable of loving her – no one at all?

‘Anyway, you don’t imagine Gal loves you, do you?’ Deirdre’s grandmother added. ‘He’s nice to you, of course. He’s not stupid. You’re his meal ticket.’

It was the cruellest thing her grandmother could possibly have said, although she didn’t seem to recognise this. Deirdre’s eyes filled with tears. She didn’t know what a meal ticket was; she only knew that her grandmother had somehow pronounced her unlovable to anyone but Mrs Dark for her own sake. And Deirdre did not doubt that her grandmother had the power to make such a pronouncement. She stared at her miserably, tears shining in her eyes, her face as vulnerable as a baby’s. She believed her. She believed her grandmother was right.

From that moment on, Deirdre could never quite bring herself to believe that Gal loved her. She knew she loved Gal – nothing could have changed that. But her grandmother’s dismissal of her love was crushing, and impossible for Deirdre to defend herself against. Who was she to claim that her love was real, when her grandmother declared it was not? She was so hurt, so disappointed, and her life and hopes seemed to have changed so completely in such a short time that it took her a while to realise that Gal was standing in the doorway.

Mrs Dark had known all along.

He was staring at her grandmother fathomlessly. His face, as usual, looked peaceful, but as always there was something beneath the apparent calm, although Deirdre did not yet understand what it was.

‘You’re a liar,’ he suddenly said to Deirdre’s grandmother.

‘How dare you,’ she snapped back, and it was not an old lady talking to a child – it was as if the argument were between equals.

‘You said that on purpose and you know it’s a lie. You know I love Deedee. I’ll always love Deedee.’

‘I’ll always love Deedee,’ Deirdre’s grandmother mocked.

‘That’s not funny,’ said Gal simply.

‘It’s funny to me. As if anyone could trust anything someone from your family said!’

‘We’re from the same family.’

‘Yes, but you’re from the funny side of it, aren’t you? The wrong side of the sheets. Little bastard, poking your arrogant little nose in where it’s not wanted. Get out of my sight.’

And that was how Deirdre first came to know about her grandmother’s hatred for Gal. She had not known it before. Perhaps she would never have known it if she had not told her that she loved him.

And yet life went on. Mrs Dark made Gal breakfast, lunch and dinner and put him to bed at night. She washed his clothes and bought him new ones when he needed them. He was only five, after all, and he was her responsibility. And no one could have accused Deirdre’s grandmother of irresponsibility.

One rainy day, Deirdre’s grandmother, Deirdre and Gal were eating macaroni cheese for lunch in front of the midday movie. The film they were watching was Waterloo Bridge.

Strangely, perhaps, Mrs Dark loved old movies, particularly romances. They were the films of her own era, it was true. She had seen them all before when she was younger, in palatial cinemas with statues of Ancient Greek goddesses holding clocks that were softly illuminated in the darkness, so that you could leave early to catch your train if you needed to. But the movies she loved seemed to enshrine all the things she disapproved of. It was odd; it was as if she drew a very thick line between life as depicted in movies and life as she and Deirdre lived it. Or as if, when she was watching movies, she was more truly herself, and most of what she said about life wasn’t true, was not even a genuine opinion; but was said only to make a point or to advance some private strategy.

Waterloo Bridge was black and white and very sad. Robert Taylor was a dashing young officer who fell in love with Vivien Leigh, a fragile, melancholy little ballet dancer. He came to see her out the front of her boarding house the morning after they met. It was pouring with rain and they kissed under his umbrella. It was the first time Deirdre had seen two people kissing. She was so young when her parents had abandoned her that she could not remember them, and she was only five, and her life had been a sheltered one, spent within a tiny family circle of her grandmother and herself.

‘Do people kiss on the lips in real life, Grandmother?’ she asked. She thought that perhaps such things only happened in films.

Mrs Dark looked sideways at her.

‘Of course not,’ she answered roundly. ‘Ugh! Can you imagine? The germs!’

Deirdre had not known what a kiss was, but she knew what germs were. Her grandmother had always been very concerned about them. It went without saying that no sensible person would do anything likely to involve germs. So it looked like kissing was out. She was not too dis­appointed; she knew the world of films and stories was a different world to this one. Nicer things happened in that world all the time.

Deirdre had never really taken her eyes off the movie, that beautiful, black-and-white, impossibly romantic world. So she did not see Gal looking at her grandmother and her grandmother looking back at Gal.

This time he said nothing, but Gal’s life had not been as sheltered as Deirdre’s and he knew propaganda when he heard it.

That afternoon, while Deirdre’s grandmother was having her daily three o’clock nap, Deirdre and Gal played Waterloo Bridge. But they only kissed the air, the strangely sweet air, in front of each other’s faces. Kissing properly was out of the question. Because of the germs.

Deirdre and Gal often looked at the photographs in Mrs Dark’s flat. In fact, after exploring, looking at the photographs was their favourite thing to do. They would linger around them in the window of time between being called in from play and sitting down to a meal. They would gaze at them, one after another, like pictures in an exhibition, while Mrs Dark was working next door in the kitchen. Often they would enter so deeply into that black-and-white world of pleading faces – each with their stories, each wanting so badly to tell your their side – that she would have to call them twice before they noticed that she had brought a meal in. And then she would smile secretly to herself.

Mrs Dark liked it when they looked at the photographs.

Some were more compelling than others. There was a photograph of the little boy Mrs Dark had lost many years ago to pneumonia, her two-year-old son James. He seemed a happy little fellow, smiling mischievously at the camera, but he was also hauntingly beautiful, with large, blue eyes and black lashes. He had never got any older. Gal thought a lot about that. And there was a photograph of Mrs Dark’s mother, a young, carefree woman despite her prim high-necked dress and upswept hair – her eyes merry, a smile playing around her solemn mouth. She had never got any older either.

Other photographs were more interesting for their absence. Gal often wondered why there was no photograph of Deirdre’s mother. Where was she now? What had she looked like? But some instinct stopped him from asking.

It was during one of these times spent staring at the photographs that Gal recognised the old lady they had met in the hall – Aunty Lainey – much younger, photographed in old-fashioned clothes and standing arm in arm with a distinguished-looking older gentleman. He had looked at the photograph before. He had known that the gentleman was Mrs Dark’s father, but he had not known who the young woman was, although he had felt that he had seen those dark eyes before. But in the end, it wasn’t her eyes he recognised. It was her uncertainty.

‘Look!’ he said to Deirdre. ‘It’s Mrs Old Lady! When she was young!’

But on this particular day, Deirdre had become so pre­occupied with another of the pictures that she hardly seemed to hear him.

‘Deedee?’ murmured Gal.

He drifted over to see what she was looking at.

And it was what happened next that made this time – of all the other occasions on which they had looked at the photo­graphs – different. Until now, the photographs had been interesting. From now on they would be fraught with meaning, not only about the past, which could not be changed, but about the living, vulnerable present.

There was a new photograph, one they hadn’t seen before, sitting prominently on Mrs Dark’s desk. This in itself wasn’t unusual – from time to time Mrs Dark would put one photograph away and replace it with another. She had a large collection of them in an old suitcase under her bed and she had a habit of rotating them. This photograph, however, was unusually arresting.

It was Mrs Dark as a child. But she wasn’t alone. She was with her father.

He was sitting posed in a chair, wearing a suit with a watch and chain in his waistcoat pocket. She was standing beside him with her arms around his neck. Her cheek was pressed against his. One of his hands was resting on her arm. He looked calm and complacent; but she was gazing at the camera with such ferocity, Gal felt himself taking a step backwards.

He was so involved in the drama of the picture that he did not notice that Mrs Dark had come up beside him, and when she spoke suddenly in his ear it was all he could do to stop himself from crying aloud.

‘My mother died when I was born,’ she was saying softly. ‘So when I was little, my grandmother looked after me. I loved my grandmother. But then, when I was five, she died too. When they told me, I cried and cried. Nobody could stop me crying.

‘Then my father came into my room and sat on the bed and put his arms around me. He told me I was his favourite girl. He said he loved me more than anything in the world. He promised he would never leave me – that we would travel the world together, that he would take me to Paris and buy me pretty things. And I believed him. So I stopped crying, and from then on, he was my whole world.’

Gal could not take his eyes off the photograph. He could not escape from Mrs Dark’s quiet voice in his ear. Deirdre was looking at the photograph too. She was still standing next to him on the other side, frozen, and of course she could hear every word. But Gal knew Mrs Dark was talking privately to him, as if what she was saying had a special significance for him alone.

‘Then,’ Mrs Dark continued more harshly, ‘he took up with Lainey, and forgot me. She moved into that beautiful flat and he spent all his time there. He didn’t eat with us any more. He stopped sitting in the lounge room reading the paper while my brother and I played. He stopped reading to me. He stopped coming into my room at bedtime to kiss me goodnight. And even when we did eat together, on Sundays, my brother and I had to be quiet, and he only talked to Lainey. Whenever she was in a room, he was looking at her.

‘I missed him so much! I was frantic. I had nightmares – sometimes I would run a temperature. But they would just give me castor oil.

‘Then they went travelling – all over the world – and it was Lainey he took to Paris and bought pretty things for. They left me again and again, with only my brother and a housekeeper to look after us. And my father didn’t even understand why I was so upset. He thought I was spoilt, selfish.

‘But I was only guilty of believing him. I thought he had meant what he said; I thought he had been telling the truth. But he only said what he’d said to stop a child crying. Losing his love was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I have never forgotten it. I never will forget it. You can see how much I loved him. It’s all there, in the photograph.’

And it was. He knew it was. Gal knew what it was to be left behind by a father. He did not feel as she did; but he understood, all the same.

‘When something like that happens, Gal,’ whispered Mrs Dark, and she was speaking to him as if Deirdre was not there, although Deirdre was listening, terrified, riveted, ‘someone always pays. Justice has to be done. Or revenge. It doesn’t matter. It has to happen. It’s built into the scheme of things. But the funny thing is,’ and here she leaned even closer, ‘it usually doesn’t happen to the person who deserves it. That’s just the way it goes. Little girls cannot pay their fathers back. They don’t have the power. But then little girls grow up and get some power of their own. So the revenge happens to someone else, someone they have power over, someone who wasn’t even born when it all happened. Someone innocent, like you.

‘Remember that, Gal. Someone has to pay, even if it’s not the right person. The revenge happens to someone else. One day, you’ll understand.’

Not long after that, something terrible happened. It was a bright, cold morning. There was frost on the ground. Deirdre and Gal had pulled on their clothes to go down to attend to Fierce Bad Rabbit: to change his water and fill his little dish with fresh rabbit food and play with him until Deirdre’s grandmother called them back in for breakfast.

At first when they got to the hutch, they couldn’t see him. Gal opened the wire door carefully and took the water dish over to the outside tap to rinse it out. Deirdre had the bag of food and a stump of lettuce. She leaned over, looking into the shadows, and called softly. Then she saw it. She had not seen it before, perhaps, because she had not known what she should have been looking for.

The rabbit was lying in a shadowy corner of the hutch, somehow dropped or thrown there, as if discarded. He was dead. Deirdre had never seen a dead creature before but one look at his dull black eyes told her. And yet that wasn’t all. It wasn’t even the worst thing.

The front of the rabbit’s rib cage had been opened and his heart torn out. The tiny organ lay separate from the dead animal in a little pool of dark blood. It had been cut in half, neatly, with a knife.

If Deirdre had been a little older she would have been terrified. She would have understood the implications, the full horror of it. But she was not older and she did not understand. She was only appalled with grief – the poor, poor little rabbit, dead, his soft, pretty body riven in two like something hanging in a butcher’s shop. She began to wail immediately with sheer overwhelming misery. Gal ran back to her, astonished, saw what she saw, understood, even at five, what she did not, put his arms around her and tried to think.

Danger, he was thinking, danger! He glanced involuntarily up at the windows. He and Deirdre were probably observable from a dozen of them. It was like standing in front of a wall of eyes. Danger. But there was no escape. He had a wild impulse to run away, but he knew he couldn’t leave Deirdre and he knew she would never come with him. She would never disobey her grandmother and he could never make her understand. He didn’t even know where his father was, and it crossed his mind, not for the first time, that he wasn’t coming back.

Gal hugged Deirdre more fiercely. What could they do? Then he remembered the cave.

They had to hide, that was all he could think, they had to hide now. Standing out in the open was intolerable, with all the windows, and the very sky seeming to look down on them, accusing them, condemning them, innocent as they were. So he took Deirdre’s hand and pulled her away from the terrifying hutch, away from the many-eyed windows, around the corner of the building. Deirdre was still weeping, but she went trustingly where Gal led. Already, there was a bond she had with Gal – like instinct, but deeper; like faith, but deeper – which was too intense for even her beloved grandmother to undermine, although the conflict between Gal and Mrs Dark was beginning to tear her apart. They pushed open the low door – half-door, half-gate – entered the little artificial cave and huddled together in the warmth on a folded sheet of canvas, among the paint tins and tools and rolled-up leftover sections of linoleum and insulation mat­erial. And there, in the half-dark, the terrible panic that had seized Gal quietened down; and he thought, she’s not going to win, she’s not going to beat me, I’m not going to let her, no matter how much she scares me. And there, after a moment, Deirdre stopped crying, and briefly, unexpectedly, they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

‘What are you two playing at? Come out at once.’

The door was too low for her. She was too tall, also too old and stiff. They saw her standing, bent, on the other side of it, peering into the shadows.

She was old. She was a grandmother. And yet her face, pale, piquant, fierce, was the face of the little girl in the photos.

It wasn’t a pleasant awakening, but it was the one both of them had expected. They crawled out blinking into the sunlight, their faces grubby and tear-stained, their clothes rumpled.

‘Just look at you both! Don’t let me ever catch you in that storeroom again. It’s not a playroom. It’s for the builders. Now. Deirdre. What did you do to that rabbit?’

Deirdre was startled, but she did not immediately catch the implication. She began to cry again at the memory.

‘The rabbit’s dead!’ she said miserably.

‘I know the rabbit’s dead,’ said Deirdre’s grandmother. ‘What I want to know is why you killed it. And what you thought you were doing with my sharpest kitchen knife.’

The strange thing was that she didn’t seem upset. Indeed her attitude was so odd, so incongruous, that Gal was even more frightened than he had been before. It was all he could do to stop himself from running, right there and then. It was as if Deirdre had forgotten to make her bed, or spilt jam on the tablecloth. Gal knew she was lying; he had known from the moment he had seen the rabbit that Mrs Dark had killed it and that it was both a warning and a punishment. But Deirdre was confused. It was terrifying to see how easily she was confused.

‘I didn’t want it to die!’ she said piteously.

‘You may not have meant for it to die,’ said her grandmother coolly. ‘But that’s what happens when you cut something’s heart out. Usually.’

Neither of them understood properly what happened next. Or at least, Deirdre never did understand it, and Gal didn’t come to understand until many years later. There was a visit to a doctor, and then some kind of specialist. And then there was testing – Deirdre answering questions and playing games in a room alone with a friendly, watchful woman who seemed halfway between a doctor and a teacher. Then there was a diagnosis. And this was how it came to pass that Deirdre did not start school until she was twelve.

She had been classified as Disturbed, because she had killed her pet rabbit and mutilated its body.

And she was supposed to be in therapy, until she was deemed well enough to have contact with other children. But somehow the therapy never eventuated.

Deirdre did not know what her grandmother told the doctors, and she would not have had the confidence to oppose her if she had.

All she remembered, later, were two contradictory things. The dreadful shock it had been to find the rabbit was dead. And the niggling, sick conviction that she had been responsible, even though she remembered nothing.

It was how she started to feel guilty. Always. About everything.

That night, as he lay in his bed in the tiny spare room in Mrs Dark’s flat, Gal dreamed that Deirdre was standing beside the bed, looking down into his face with great urgency, as if she needed to tell him something.

Then he realised he was not dreaming.

He sat bolt upright in his bed, panting with shock. But Deirdre did not react to his surprise. She went on standing there, gazing down at him, as if there was room in her mind for only one thought. She was wearing the full-length white nightgown she always wore to bed. Her hair was long and straight and fair in the streetlight that poured through the window – for it was never really dark at night in Corbenic – the building was on the main street of the town. It wasn’t quiet either – cars swished past; newspapers were delivered to the newsagency opposite; in the early hours of the morning the garbage trucks trundled their way up the street, stopping outside each building. But Deirdre knew none of this. She just stood there, staring down at him and thinking her one thought.

‘I’m sorry, Gal,’ she said in a strange, listless way, mournfully, and yet somehow without passion. ‘I’m sorry.’

Gal swallowed, terrified.

‘That’s all right, Deedee,’ he whispered.

She inclined her head, very slowly, still staring at him, then she turned and left the room.

He never forgot what she looked like walking away from him, her long white nightdress, her long fair hair. And when she had gone he stayed upright, staring at his doorway, afraid she would come back, until the dawn made it seem safe enough to lie down again.

He didn’t ask her about it the next morning, but he knew she did not remember.

It was years before he understood that she had been sleepwalking. At five he did not know what sleepwalking was. But even when he understood that, he could not begin to imagine what it was she was sorry for.

And then – was it a week later? a month? – something happened to Deirdre and Galahad that was so important, so transcendent, it changed them, and bound them, forever.

They had been exploring, as usual, in the building. It was raining outside and they could hear the rain dripping down through the many drainpipes. Sometimes Deirdre felt that they lived in a fortress of drainpipes. Gal had been complaining of a pain in his chest. He wasn’t coughing, but Mrs Dark had grown up in this mountain town of pilgrims from the city with hollow cheeks and dark circles under their eyes, people who had tuberculosis and who had come for the pure, healing air. So she had talked of taking him to the doctor for a chest X-ray.

It was odd how one minute it was open war between them, the next minute she was treating him as if he was her child and she a fussing, attentive guardian.

However, the visit didn’t seem to be going to take place anytime soon. Mrs Dark was very busy, these days, with her building plans.

They never seemed to get to the end of the passages and stairways and rooms to explore. They had wandered down a dark hallway with doors on either side of it: all locked, all apparently leading to empty flats that had been shut up because they couldn’t be let. They were about to turn back, disappointed; they didn’t remember this hall and it had seemed more promising from the outside than within. But then Gal noticed a dim glow on the wall at the end. It was oblong-shaped and they suddenly realised the passage did not culminate in a dead end but turned at right angles towards some place more brightly lit. The peculiar thing was, the light looked like sunshine.

And yet they could still hear the rain dripping relentlessly through the pipes.

‘We’re in the middle of the building,’ Gal said suddenly. He was sure it was true, although he didn’t know how he could tell, unless it was some kind of instinct. ‘The very middle,’ he said wonderingly. ‘Like the centre of the earth. Except this is the centre of Corbenic.’

Then Deirdre did something that startled him. She turned her head towards him and looked at him in a weird, interior kind of way, as if she was there, but not there; as if she was blind, or sleepwalking.

‘I know,’ she said.

They ventured on towards the end, turned the corner, and were confronted with a surprising sight. Another hall – a strange, rough, empty hall like a stony passage between an underground network of caves. Only there was a stairway at the end of it and the steps seemed to be made of stones, naturally occurring stones, which might have been found in a river. The stairway led upward. At the top was a gate with iron bars. Through it poured a dim red-gold light.

They did not speak; but they reached for each other’s hands, and walked towards it.

The gate looked very old, older than the building; too old to be in the building. It looked like something that might be found somewhere in an old, old church: a gate round the tomb of a knight or a saint, perhaps. As they approached Deirdre grew strangely confident. She went ahead a little, pulling him by the hand. She walked up the steps and instead of peering in through the bars, as he had expected, reached in and found a latch that was invisible to him but which, when released, caused the door to drift gently open.

He followed her inside.

There was light all around and the room seemed to be made of crystal – that is, cut glass – which, like the light, was impossible. There were no walls, only windows, and the windows looked like diamonds. The room was circular and contained only one thing – an iron plinth on which stood a crystal box. The box had a lid, also crystal.

The sunlight seemed to be shining through the cut glass from within the box. But the box was not filled with light, or not light only. There was something inside, something about the size of a fist that could be dimly perceived through the glass. It glowed red-gold and it moved, or jumped, rhythmically, almost as if the fist were clenching itself and releasing, clenching itself and releasing, with a blind, but conscious intensity.

‘It’s a little animal!’ whispered Gal. ‘Is it – a frog? He must be trapped! But how does he live?’

‘He’s not trapped,’ whispered Deirdre. ‘That’s his cage. He lives because I feed him. Grandmother put him here. It’s my task to guard him and look after him.’

‘So you’ve been here before?’

‘I come here every night,’ said Deirdre. ‘But when I’m not here, I forget. I had forgotten until just now. I never think about it when I’m not here. I think I come here when I’m sleeping. Perhaps I’m sleeping now. Do you want to see him?’

Gal nodded, and Deirdre took the glass bowl in her hand and offered it to him. ‘Take off the lid,’ she said.

Gal did so and the moment he did they both saw something so beautiful, so important and so heartbreakingly sad that it seemed to explain everything, all at once – even questions they had never thought to ask. They both gazed at it for a moment, lost in wonder and love. Then they looked at each other, and knew, even then, even though they were only five, that this would be the most important moment in their lives.

They could never have believed, at that moment, that it would be possible to forget what was in the box. And yet, they did, as soon as Mrs Dark appeared in the doorway.

She must have known. She must have been able to tell. She must have been able to feel what was going on in the building, as if it were a part of her body, as if the building was her body, or perhaps, her mind. And she must have been waiting for this to happen.

And yet now, she was truly, lividly angry.

‘What is he doing here?’ she asked Deirdre, without taking her eyes off Gal.

At such a moment another child might have dropped the box, but Deirdre was not that child. Instead she held it tightly to her chest, as if to put herself between it and her grandmother.

‘Please, Grandmother, please,’ she begged. ‘Don’t be angry with Gal. He didn’t mean to come here. I didn’t either. I forgot it was here! Please don’t be angry.’

‘I’m not angry,’ said Deirdre’s grandmother. But something about the way she said it made Deirdre’s stomach give with a sudden, sickening lurch. ‘Not – angry,’ she repeated. ‘I’m disappointed. Disappointed.’ She swayed a little as she stood and for a moment Deirdre thought she was going to fall. ‘Not in him,’ she went on. ‘I wouldn’t have expected any better. I’m disappointed in you, Deirdre.’ And she stared at her and Deirdre lowered her eyes, trying helplessly to escape the deep, searing reproach, but not succeeding. She felt utterly guilty, utterly condemned. ‘He will have to go. I cannot harbour such a child. His influence will ruin you.’

‘Please . . .’ Deirdre tried to say, but she had no voice.

Her grandmother turned to Gal.

And Deirdre, in her despair, had a strange and wild series of thoughts. She is the biggest thing! There is nothing bigger! There is no one bigger to ask mercy from! she thought. And then, in a kind of final hopelessness, She is God!

‘Because you have dared to come into this place without my permission, and because you looked inside my box – my private box! – you have lost my protection forever, and you will never set foot in Corbenic again. And you will never speak to Deirdre again, either. Your friendship ends now. You will stay the night here, but tomorrow morning I will take you back to the farm and you can move in with whoever will have you. You’ve had your chance. Now you’re no concern of mine.’

She looked at him for a moment, waiting for his face to crumble, but it didn’t. He just stared back at her, never lowering his eyes, his expression unfathomable. She turned suddenly to Deirdre, as if to stop the power draining from her before it was too late, and Deirdre kept shaking her head in grief and terror and trying to say no, no, but still her grandmother said, ‘Because you brought him here and showed him what is in the box I will take him away from you and you will never leave Corbenic. You will be the guardian of this room, and what is in it, for the rest of your life. And although you will long for it, you will never have my total love again. Neither will you win the love of anyone else. Some things are unforgivable, Deirdre. This is one of them. You are unforgiven, and love is denied you, for the rest of your life.

‘Now get out of my sight. Both of you.’

And although it had taken so long for them to find the room, the way back to the flat was so short it had the speed of an evil thing in a nightmare. They remembered nothing of the way out of the room, or the way down the steps, or the way back down the corridor. They seemed only to begin the journey before they found themselves in bed, alone, in disgrace, at opposite ends of the flat, with all their lives an impossible burden before them.

Gal never had a real home again. Nobody ever knew what happened to his father, but he never came back. So the little boy went back to a life of kindly neglect by aunts and uncles and older cousins, this relative or that relative – one person or another who cared about him vaguely, but didn’t have the resources to look after him permanently. And nobody in that branch of the family ever imagined that he wasn’t all right, because he always seemed cheerful, and his face was never other than calm and impenetrable.

But underneath there were three emotions that never left him, three emotions so powerful that at times they dizzied him. Love for Deirdre – who shone in his memory – the only person he had ever really mattered to, the only person who had ever really needed him. Hatred for her grandmother, who had separated them. And anger, deep, ever-present anger that was like a subterranean river flowing through the vast empty caverns within him, always threatening to flood his entire being.

From then on, controlling that anger was an exhausting hourly struggle.

The day he left Corbenic, he swore that, when he was grown up, he would come back and rescue Deirdre.

But every night he lay awake, the pain in his chest almost tearing him apart.