8.

I still have this recurring dream. It started around then, when I was ten, after Dad thought a doctor would sort me out. It’s always the same. Emily and I are sitting on the rug in Grandad’s old living room. The room is dark, other than Grandma’s floral armchair. Spread beneath us is one of Grandad’s old maps. Emily is trying to tell me something but when she opens her mouth all I hear is white noise. Her face is chalky, and her hair shines, swirling down the front of her like a dripping black candle. I’m flapping my arms, becoming more and more desperate to understand, but she just carries on, regardless. I’m about to grab her fully around the shoulders when I spot Grandad in the floral armchair. He’s watching us together, making notes in a brown notebook. He’s thin and grey, just how he was when I last saw him, and the hand holding the pen trembles. I leap up and grab his cold wrists but his arms retract and fold across his chest like an insect. He clicks his tongue furiously, but I don’t have the Verbatinea, and I can’t keep up. Tears in my eyes, I turn back to Emily, who behind me is sprouting black feathers down her back.

The first time I had that dream, I woke up sweating. My pyjamas were on the floor and I shivered in the April air. My arms and legs felt long and awkward, as if each had more joints than they should. Through the window it was still dark, with only the slightest hint of lilac on the horizon. I’d never seen the village this early in the morning. The street looked almost blue, still as stone. But after watching for only a few minutes, I spotted a solitary figure, stooped and heavy, stumbling down our street towards the cow fields. Once or twice he turned his head to look at the rotting offerings in the curb, but he never paused. He walked like his feet hurt him. He walked like everything hurt him.

I took a deep breath and grabbed some clothes from the pile at the bottom of the bed. Still pulling on the jumper, I made my way down the stairs, thinking light thoughts to not set off any creaking.

My heart was racing, but I had to do this. I just had to.

I stepped out onto the street, still in my slippers. The air felt damp on my face, and a thin mist hovered just over the grass. It was so silent that my breath echoed, or at least it seemed so to me. The man was at least halfway down the street now, lurching with every step. Keeping my distance, I mirrored his slow trudge, desperately trying to work out what I’d say if he turned around. What had Grandad said to one of them, that time a year or so before when he’d approached one of the mudmen late at night? No one had known I was watching from my bedroom window, that I’d seen Grandad limp across the road to grab him by the shoulder. The man had stopped for a second to look at the map Grandad was flailing, then had given Grandad a strange look that I couldn’t understand. It struck me as a look of surprise, but he was biting his lips shut, as if he had to fight to keep silent. Grandad pointed towards the cow fields and then back at the map. Grandad was talking furiously, but the mudman’s face didn’t shift. He just waited until Grandad stopped talking, then continued walking. Grandad followed him and grasped his shoulder again, but the man shook him off with a huge, bear-like paw. Grandad was left in the middle of the street, watching as the man disappeared through the gap in the fence.

I wouldn’t make the same mistake.

By the time the man reached the end of our street, the sky was beginning to break into light blue. How could it take one person so long to reach the end of the street? Everything about him drifted, like he wasn’t driving himself at all but instead was moved by the wind. As he reached the broken fence, I braced myself to follow him through the gap, but instead he turned to the left and dragged himself towards the empty pink house on the corner.

Hot breath and a whisper behind my ear. “What are you doing?”

I fell from crouching onto my knees and gripped my chest. It was Emily, wrapped in Mum’s brown fluffy coat. Her eyebrows were scrunched up and she looked at me like I was a stranger.

“Go home,” I whispered, as forcefully as I could manage.

Emily just shook her head and grabbed my sleeve. “Only if you’re coming.”

Yanking my arm free, I turned back to track the mudman but he was nowhere. He’d disappeared. “No,” I whispered. “No no no no no.” I stood up tall and scanned everything for a trace of him. I had only turned away from him for a minute. How had he vanished, just like that?

“Emily, that man. Down there. Where did he go?”

She pouted. “Who?”

“You were looking that way, you must have seen!”

She gave a little shrug. “I didn’t see anyone. Who was it?”

I pushed my fists hard into my eye sockets. This had been my chance, and I’d blown it.

“Come on.” Emily stood beside me. “We’ll talk about it at home, all right? Come back before Mum and Dad know you’ve gone.”

Something red hot shot up from my belly. “Why did you follow me? You’ve spoiled this.”

“I saw you from my window,” she said, her voice soft. “Creeping along the gardens like a weird little beetle. I waited for you to make your way back but you didn’t. So I came to get you.”

We were inches from each other when she reached over and pulled me into her chest. One arm around my shoulder and another on my hair. It was warm, and smelled like vanilla. It was like being petted. For a moment I could almost sense the next words she’d say before she shaped them and I recoiled. Emily held out a hand. “Come on. Let’s talk to Dad.”

I stepped back again. “Why?”

She opened her mouth and closed it again, but nothing came out. Her cheeks were starting to flush. I saw her in a new light then, Emily. She was all colour. Amazing, angry, and blinding, whereas my eyes longed for the earthy shape of the mudman. I couldn’t let him go. I needed to know.

And then I turned from my sister and I ran down the centre of the street, not even caring if anyone saw me, because the truth is, I knew no one would be able to. It wasn’t that I was invisible, it was more that I didn’t matter. When I reached the pink house, I scrambled over the wall and ran up to the black front door to hurl my entire body against it again, and again, and again. But it didn’t budge.

“Stop, stop!” Emily was behind me again and pulled me away from the door, “You’ll break your shoulder.”

“Get OFF me.” Everything trembled, like I was made of electricity. My skin tingled where the breeze licked it, and where the dew caught on my ankles. It flashed across my mind that this must be how an insect feels – something small enough to feel the world as this huge living thing.

Emily yanked me by my arm and I looked up at the bedroom window, the place I always avoided looking. And in the darkness I saw her face, her peach hair trailing down her back. I remember her staring out from the top window, a small bear clutched in her hands, the skin on her arms bone-white, dotted with freckles. I remember the last time I saw her kind face, around two years earlier, following Emily and I with her eyes as we made our way to the bus stop. They were wide and grey, just like mine.

“Do you remember her, Emily?” I shouted. “The woman who lived here. She was nice.”

“You said you didn’t,” she whispered.

“What happened to her?”

Emily leaned back but didn’t let go of my sleeve. “She just… left.”

“But WHERE? Where do they go? Where do any of them go? What’s happening?”

“She was sad. They took her to a blue house. She might still be there.”

“No… She left. She left like all the people on the posters. She went somewhere.”

“She did,” Emily’s voice slowed right down. “She went to a blue house.”

“NO.”

“She did. That’s what everyone says, anyway. Someone died, and she needed looking after. It’s not a mystery.”

“She was different. Just like me. Just like Grandad.”

“OK.”

“They did something…” I was running out of breath, out of momentum. “Something.”

“Come on,” her soft, vanilla voice in my ear. “Come home now. I won’t tell Mum or Dad, if you come now.”

“Is Grandad,” my voice faded to a crackle, “in a blue house? He was sad too, from Grandma.”

Emily gasped and pulled me close, squeezing what little air I had left out through my mouth. “Is that what you think? Oh, Davey, no.” I closed my eyes and sank onto her, clinging to the masses of Mum’s fluffy coat. “He’s dead.”

“He isn’t. I’ve seen him,” I pulled away and gasped for air. “At the supermarket. I followed him. He disappeared.”

“He’s dead,” Emily rubbed her hand across her lips. “How can you think this? You need to talk to Dad.”

“Dad lies. Dad lies.” Though we were both still, Emily was becoming smaller and smaller. No longer did her skin warm my skin. She seemed to change shape, into someone bigger and alien. Emily wasn’t my Emily. Not now.

“Dad never lies. Dad’s still grieving.” She reached out her hand. “I saw him crying again last night,” whispered Emily, “on the wall outside. You’re making everything worse for him.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

Emily shook her head slowly. “David…” She clasped her face in her hands. “I don’t understand you.”

And in that split second, I remembered being in Grandad’s office, a year or so before, and Emily and I were standing between those wall-mounted mirrors. As I looked left and right, hundreds of Davids spilling out into the distance, my breath caught in my chest. Grandad sat in his chair in front of us, those beetle-black eyes glittering with excitement, saying, “See them? See them? Worlds upon worlds of you, separated by light. Imagine that? And though they look the same, they’re not at all.”

My chest tightened, though I didn’t know what he meant. And beside me, Emily just shrugged and swept her hair back from her face. “But they’re all just me, Grandad. They’re all just me.”

She would never see. Perhaps she couldn’t. Emily was exactly where she needed to be, but me… Grandad knew that I was something different. Just like him. Searching for our own kind. We stood out. And perhaps the rest couldn’t see that. We weren’t all the same.

And then it all snapped. What had been soft and safe between Emily and I became a void. She couldn’t help me. She wasn’t looking for more.

“Please, please come home.”

I nodded my head once. “All right. I’ll come.” Our fingers met, and her hands were cold. Just before we headed across the lawn, I took one hard look through the window next to the front door. On the floor was a dirty red bed roll, and beside it, a scatter of what looked like newspapers. Something brushed against my bare left wrist and I flinched, scratching at the contact spot. It was close to impossible to see in the dim light, but it didn’t look bitten. As I kept rubbing it, a burning sensation flushed up towards my elbow like hot running wax, and then just like that, the sensation was gone.

In the corner of the room, something glittered. How could I have known then what I was looking at? Around a foot from the floor, about the size of a football. Something silver, and moving. Turning in a circle. Years later, I described it as like tin foil, being quickly flattened and moulded by hands as dark as the wall behind them. Folding in on itself again, and again, and again.

The house sold not long after that, maybe just a couple of weeks. The buyers knocked most of it down and rebuilt it so it was no longer pink. It sat, grey and square, just like the others on the street, but the windows filled with light. Another grey-haired couple, curtains open, looking out onto the street beyond their TV. Our street was the place where eyes watched, but no one spoke. And by the time winter rolled around and Grandad had been missing for a full year, I still stepped up to the garden wall, peering inside to find that silver slice of air. But the house was alive again, and whatever I’d witnessed had gone.

I was at a dead end. Trapped in a lie. Starting to realise that Grandad hadn’t wanted me to know the truth. He’d left me, just like he’d left everyone else. I wasn’t special.

Emily was spending more and more time at her theatre group, and I still had nowhere else to go after school, so a couple of nights a week Mum drove me to church with her while she helped Father Patrick. Most of the time, I was happy to hide where no one would talk to me. All I wanted to do was watch, clinging to the walls like moss. And from what I could tell, St Anthony of Padua’s volunteers mostly consisted of a bunch of old women who flapped around the priest like chickens. Mum was the youngest of the group, and while there, she always seemed to be dressed in clothes I hadn’t seen her in before. She always took her coat off, even when the church was cold enough to make your breath puff out in plumes, to reveal floral dresses that swished at the ankle, and tops with frills around the neck. She normally told me to wait in a pew, so I’d sit in the back corner where it felt dark and damp, running my hands along the cold wood. When Father Patrick walked in with his fluffy black quiff, Mum’s eyes became wider and she’d touch her hair over and over. As Christmas approached, Father Patrick often held evening services, so I sat at the back even longer those nights. As the priest spoke, the volunteers all stood in the wings and nodded constantly, like they were in on a secret.

“Hope has power,” he bellowed, as if calling to someone at the end of a tunnel. The small group in front of him barely twitched. “How can we use the teachings to rise above our weight? The Modern Problem.” He chuckled to himself. “There, I said it. The epidemic. The disappearing. The eloping. The exodus. It touches us all, directly or indirectly. We might have loved ones who’ve made a difficult decision to cut away from their community, turn away from God. Or we ourselves might have felt the loss of our own selves, or that… dislocation… of heart. The lust to break away from God’s path.” The congregation shuffled in their seats. He continued, “We might even know someone who is in-between, in a blue house.” Someone sniffed towards the back. “But I’m not here to judge sin. Today, we consider the power of optimism through the writings of the Apostle Peter, since he himself is known as the ‘Apostle of Hope.’” When he raised his arms, his white cassock rose up a little and revealed his black shoes and black trousers. Underneath, he was just as dark as the rest of us. “Because, family, we all share our garden. Our world. A place of contemplation and nourishment. It is what we make it.” Father Douglas cleared his throat. “We all know someone who has made a problematic choice. Those who live in God’s light and grace can’t know what makes our friends choose the dark path, but dark times could be ahead of us all, if we give way to temptation.”

Above Father Patrick’s head, a streetlamp illuminated the stained glass. A white dove carrying a twig. Flying from fire. The congregation hummed like wasps. A few pews ahead of me, a woman in a blue coat bounced a toddler on her knee. He was already asleep, but she kept jiggling him mercilessly, causing his head to loll about. How couldn’t she see?

The priest’s words and the volunteers’ mindless nodding was making me sick, so I stood up, grabbed my bag, and crept from the pew out into the night. The thick layer of white that’d made everything clean was starting to drip from the roof, and the path in front of the church was now slushy and muddy with footprints. I shivered and breathed in as deeply as I could, savouring the metallic sting of the evening air in my nostrils. It smelled far better than the damp inside the church. Everything there felt like Father Patrick.

Slinging my bag across my back, I strode towards the light of the library. The front door was a mosaic of faces now, competing for space. They looked younger than the last time I’d seen them. I flung open the door and strode past the blue-spectacled woman at reception, who muttered, “We close at six,” without even looking up.

Like last time, there were mudmen sitting one to a table, each of them intent on an open book or a faded print-out. Some traced lines of text with their eyes and fingers. But this time there were far fewer than before, only four of them. But still, at the sight of those four, warmth rushed through my arms, right down to my fingertips. When I reached the nearest occupied table, I tapped the man seated there on the shoulder. His hair was long and matted, the ends twisting past his shoulders. His beard and moustache were so dense that I could hardly see the face beneath, but what skin I did see looked red and ruddy. Every inch of him, skin and cloth, looked smeared with a layer of dirt. He breathed loud through his nose, quicker and quicker, as if building up to something. In his hand he clasped a book, and I could just about make out a drawing of a bird with a long tail that curled around its tapered body in a circle.

The man froze. He didn’t even appear to be breathing. But I was satisfied of one thing at least: he was flesh and bone. Warm and alive.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please.”

The man’s broad hands spread over the diagram in front of him. His fingernails were chewed down to stubs. A groan erupted from his throat and a rotten smell plumed up towards my face.

“Where are you going? Tell me,” I pleaded.

The man squeezed his eyes shut and then – and I swear I’m remembering this right – he growled. Low and rumbling, like a dog ready to attack. I took a couple of steps back, and as I did so I whispered, “Please, please.” But the man didn’t turn, just rattled and groaned like a ship at sea. I fought the urge to grab his hair, to shake him, to show him how much I needed the truth. My teeth clenched as tears flooded my eyes. I stood there, shaking, choking, finding it harder and harder to take a breath. Inside, I screamed, ‘Someone, help me.’

“Home, boy. We’re going home.”

A tap on my forearm, and I turned to look right into the eyes of another of the mudmen. This one had a shaved head, painted with tattoos. His skin was so thin that it looked blue, and his eyes were as black as ink. Almost without realising, I was counting the blue veins running from his temples down to his throat. He looked at me like he knew me.

“We’re going home.”

That night, I watched out of my bedroom window for Dad leaving the house. As I waited, a strange noise, like static, rose slowly in my ears and the same itching sensation I’d felt in the pink house tickled my left wrist. This time, there was enough light from my bedside lamp to see what was happening. I peeled back my sleeve, expecting to see a red rash or white bump from an insect’s sting. But my wrist looked entirely normal. I was rubbing it when – at a little after nine o’clock – Dad stumbled down our path and onto the street, heading in the direction of the cow fields. His hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his black jacket, a tight grey hat pulled low over his ears.

Already in my coat and shoes, I crept out after him, clinging to our neighbours’ dark walls. When he reached the broken fence posts at the end of the street he paused for a moment, gripping the splintered wood in his gloved hands. I held my breath, willing him to take a step – pushing him to. But after a minute or so, he turned to the left and staggered around the newly grey house and down the lamplit street. I kept my distance, thinking like a cat. But suddenly the pavement jolted. Or was it me that did? Keeping up with Dad seemed to take all my concentration as I staggered side to side. My knee and ankle joints were too soft, and buckled beneath me with each step. What was going on? I dragged my palm along a fence for stability as I kept going. After a minute or so, the sensation passed and I was strong enough to stand on my own again. A few deep breaths and I carried on.

I must have followed him for almost an hour as he slowly meandered through the village, his face turned to the ground. Occasionally he paused at a corner to lean on a wall or a lamppost. I kept to the fences and the bushes, ready to hold on if my legs were to go again.

Eventually, he turned a corner again and I realised that he had effectively been walking home all along, but he’d taken the most ridiculously long route. When we reached our front gate, he closed it behind him before I got there. Not caring anymore, I forced it back open again with a loud and angry creak. Dad turned on the doorstep, his eyes small and dark.

“Oh, you,” he said. “Why were you following me?”

I didn’t say anything. What could I have said? Sheer desperation?

“What do you want, David? I’m just getting some air. If you wanted to come with me, you just had to ask. Why are you creeping? Why are you like this?”

I clung to the bushes. There was nothing to say. He hadn’t been going anywhere, after all. I was wrong.

“God, David. How are you going to get anywhere in the world,” he muttered, “or be anyone, if you don’t fucking speak? What are you? Crawling around with your books on beetles and dark things that live under stones. Why can’t you just be normal, for once?” He stared at me for a long minute before unlocking the door. Finally, he snarled, “I give up. I suppose you should come in, then.”

He turned and walked into the house, and without thinking I followed him into the darkness.

Once inside, there was only one thing I wanted to do. I was shaking, and my fingers – too long, and too wrong – fumbled with the black book. Right in front of me, my hands became these huge white spiders, grasping at the cover. I closed my eyes and sobbed. I wasn’t right. I wasn’t supposed to be here. Dad had silenced Grandad’s last words to me by taking that letter he’d left for me. And now it was my turn to do the same.

I took the Verbatinea, our dead language, and plunged it deep into the kitchen bin with the rest of the rubbish.

That look. Why won't you catch my eye? Is it my honesty that makes your skin crawl or is it what you see when you look at me? I dare you.

Look at me.