They come and sit nearby, sometimes together, sometimes alone, but I pretend not to see them. I’ve got myself here now, and, now that I’m in this comfortable bed in this quiet road with curtains that block out all the light, I realise that I am, in fact, dog-tired and hurting, and a couple of days’ sleep and recuperation is just the ticket. She brought a doctor with grey hair and spectacles, who took my temperature and listened to my chest with a stethoscope and decided that I wasn’t in imminent danger of death, and prescribed delicious painkillers and large amounts of water ‘whether she wants to or not – flush those contusions through her kidneys and liver’. And I certainly look the part. I crept into the bathroom and had a look in the mirror when they were all asleep. I look like chopped aubergine.
No wonder she believed I’d collapsed for real.
My aunt feeds me neon-orange soup from a plain white bowl – oh, the sheer deliciousness of little strips of buttered toast; she makes me drink a glass of water every hour I’m awake, puts a funny little bell by my bedside, chases the children out when they’ve been there silently staring at me as I pretend to sleep, for too long. And I spend more time than I would have thought possible unconscious in the clammy dark, as though a few bruises might actually have made me sick.
My dreams are chaos. A swirling vortex of chaos, punctuated by screams of rage. Have been all my life. It’s mostly just darkness and movement and a sense of being followed.
But in a dream in this bed I go back to Plas Golau, and the man is lying at my feet halfway up the hill road in the woods. He’s grinning that open-mouthed grin and his hands are claws. But he’s dead. I’ve made sure of that. There’s a pool of blood beneath him. I roll him with my toes until he hits the slope and disappears into the undergrowth. He won’t be bothering me again. I’m done with him now. And I walk on, up the hill, back to my home.
I cross the orchard. Laundry flutters like carnival banners in the breeze. I remember what it was really like – the drooping grey, the drizzle that filled the air – but this is another day, a day before the people came. No one is here but me.
A lark sings, somewhere in the blue, and the approach, through this beautiful countryside I know so well, makes me feel so full I could explode. We made a place of beauty, up here in the hills, Cader Idris soaring above us, its colours changing with every passing moment. It’s the thing the Dead will never understand. That life was hard at Plas Golau, but what we made was beautiful.
And then I turn through the gates and see that the Great Disaster has arrived.
A sharp pain in my ribs snatches my breath away, throws me from sleep. A cramp. I must have been panting, and set it off. I don’t know which way to go to stretch it out. Either way the agony will be worse before it gets better. Eventually, I stretch. Hiss as the muscles ripple red-hot between my ribs and the spasm goes all the way to my spine.
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘oh,’ and then I look up and see that Eden and Ilo are sitting at the end of the bed, looking alarmed. ‘Aaaaah, sorry,’ I say, pushing myself into a sitting position against the pillows. ‘Cramp.’
Ilo gets up and walks to my end of the bed. ‘Where?’ he asks. I point. Bottom of the ribcage, left-hand side. He bends his elbow and digs it into the ball of molten metal under my skin and it shrieks, fights back, relaxes.
I exhale with relief. ‘Thanks.’
‘That’s okay,’ he says, and walks back to sit by my sister.
‘Where have you been?’ Eden asks.
‘Weston-super-Mare,’ I say, ‘and Hounslow.’
‘Where’s Hounslow?’
‘East of here. Near London.’
‘You’re meant to look after me,’ she says.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I was looking. But I was ill. For a long time. And you had Ilo.’
‘What if I’d died?’ she asks. ‘Where would we be then?’
And I look at her and look at her, and I remember how she was when she was a little kid, and I’m glad you’ll never grow up like Lucien’s children, baby. Knowing you’re special is a long way different from being special.
‘How are you feeling?’ asks Ilo.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Like I’ve been run over.’
‘Aunt Sarah said you’d been robbed.’
‘Yes.’
He frowns. ‘That doesn’t sound like you.’
‘They caught me off-guard. And I’m not ... as fit as I was. What day is it?’
‘Sunday.’
‘What time?’
‘Half-past ten,’ says Eden. ‘You look a lot better. When are you going to get up?’
‘I probably stink,’ I say.
‘There are three bathrooms here,’ says Ilo. ‘There’s actually one through that door over there, look, for this room alone. You’ve been peeing in it, but you probably don’t remember. You’ve been delirious.’
‘On sweet,’ I say, looking at the door. They look blank. ‘That’s what it’s called,’ I say. ‘An On Sweet.’
They both look doubtful.
‘She said to call her when you woke up,’ says Eden, ‘so she can make you some breakfast.’
‘She?’
‘Aunt Sarah.’
‘Oh, yes. Of course.’
Eden nods. ‘Apparently you collapsed.’ She doesn’t sound very impressed. ‘This is our grandparents’ room,’ she adds.
I pretend to look around, though I’ve had plenty of time to familiarise myself with the taupe walls and the beige carpet and the two hard-backed armchairs, all of it looking like no one ever stopped living here. ‘Is it?’ I ask. ‘In Finbrough?’
‘You’ve been looking for us, then?’ asks Eden.
‘I told you. Where were you?’
‘A place called Barmouth. Quite close to home. Then she brought us here. We go to school now.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Weird. Boring. They’re all interested in stupid things and don’t know about anything useful. I like you with hair, by the way. It suits you.’
‘You too,’ I reply. I look at them both. Grown some, and she’s pretty with her mop of curls. He’s looking thinner, softer than he was when I left him. Life on the Outside weakens you. Well, it has me.
‘I should go and get her,’ Eden says. ‘We’re going to go up to the supermarket when it opens. Did you know? They buy a whole week’s food in one go, most of them. Can you imagine?’
‘Have you tried jerk chicken?’ I ask. I know. Shallow talk. But food was a lot of what we talked about. We thought about it, all of us, all the time. There never, despite all our work, seemed to ever be quite enough.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Have you tried Indian food?’
‘No.’
‘There’s a restaurant on the High Street. Near our grandparents’ church.’
‘You can buy jerk chicken from a man literally opposite there,’ I say, then think, shit, that’s probably more information than I wanted to give. I know I said I’d been looking, but I don’t necessarily want Aunt Sarah knowing how close I came. But they don’t seem to notice.
‘She gives us ten pounds a week, each, you know,’ says Ilo.
‘Wow,’ I say. That’s a lot of jerk chicken.
‘Aunt Sarah smokes,’ he confides. ‘I smell it sometimes after we’ve gone to bed. She goes out into the garden.’
‘Mm. I suppose you don’t worry too much about that sort of thing when you’re already Dead,’ I say.
‘I guess,’ says Eden. ‘It’s a shame, though. I like her, even if she is. We’re going to save her, if we can.’
‘Don’t hold out too much hope, E,’ I tell her.
A tap on the door, and the person outside waits until we invite them in. What a world. It’s my aunt, in a long flowered skirt that makes her look a bit like a dinner table. Now that I’m not taken by surprise, now I’m feeling better, I can tell that Eden is right. There’s something about her that’s just nice. A strange, warm contrast to this sad and featureless room. She has a nice smile – real and immediate, not like ours. It’s the smile that reminds me most of Somer, I think, though the way she was frowning on my doorstep yesterday, all uncertainty, was what made me know her instantly. I must practise. It would help us fit in.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asks. ‘I thought I’d leave it to these two to wake you up.’
‘I’m ...’ I think about it. ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I think I’m better.’
Actually, I am. I don’t think I was as not-ill as I thought, even if I did ham it up to get here. That was some beating that man gave me. Still. I gave him more.
‘Those are some nasty bruises,’ she says. ‘I had a fair amount of trouble persuading the doctor to leave you here.’
‘For a few bruises?’
‘You can get a sort of jaundice when the blood reabsorbs,’ she says. Then blushes, rather sweetly, as though she thinks she’s showing off. ‘Or something like that.’
‘We don’t do stuff like jaundice,’ I tell her, and see that mystified look Melanie wore a lot. ‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘you stay in bed. Don’t get up. You need to rest. There’ll always be someone about if you need us. We’re all going to have to go in to work tomorrow, but you’re welcome to stay and rest up, and I’ll just be at the other end of the phone.’
I look at Eden, startled. ‘You work? I didn’t think you were allowed.’
Sarah laughs, nervously. ‘No, no, sorry. I work at the school where Eden and Ilo go. I work in the office.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘How do you feel? Up to some breakfast?’
‘I would sell Ilo for some breakfast,’ I say. Charm. I am all charm. I learned a lot from Lucien.
She laughs. ‘I’m not sure how much he’d fetch. But you can make her something, can’t you, Ilo? There’s eggs, and bread for toast, and some orange juice,’ and at the thought of all that I am practically weeping.
‘Thank you,’ I say, and I mean it.
‘Eden and I are going to the supermarket. Is that okay? You’ll be okay with Ilo?’
My little brother. Five months lost. ‘Of course,’ I say.