After we left Grandpa’s house Simon and I kept walking. We walked for so long that we got to the bridge, which is where the track meets the road and crosses the river. Mum says I’m not allowed to go over the bridge by myself, because over the bridge is The Other Side of Town.

I asked Jonas one day how big our town is, because he is much better at numbers than I am, and he said it is about two-thousand-people-sized, which means it is a small town. Two thousand sounds like a lot to me. Two thousand pencils on a desk would be a lot of pencils, and two thousand birds in a tree would be a lot of birds. But I guess the two thousand people in our town are never all in the same place at once. If you walk down the main street you will probably only see about thirty people, and about half of those people will say hello to you because they have seen you in the school play or they know your mum from night classes or your grandpa from church. And that’s what, I think, really makes it a small town.

The name of my town is Bloomsbury. I have lived in Bloomsbury for as long as I can remember. I went to kindergarten here, and not many people can remember before kindergarten. (Jonas is the only person I know who can remember being a baby. He remembers being in a cot and crying for ages and nobody coming to pick him up.) Diana can remember before we came to Bloomsbury because she was in Grade Two then. She says we used to live in The City but we moved because Mum and Dad were sick of the traffic and the noise and the prices.

My town isn’t big enough to have a lot of traffic but it is big enough to have two sides. Some of the things on My Side of Town are:

1) My house

2) Jonas’s house

3) Grandpa’s house

4) School

5) Church

6) The post office

7) The fish-and-chip shop

And some of the things on The Other Side of Town are:

1) The bank

2) The Very Nice Restaurant

3) The hospital

4) The bus station

5) Lee Street (a dead-end street that Diana and I aren’t allowed to go down because, Mum says, ‘It’s just not the kind of place you need to be hanging around.’ Whenever adults talk about Lee Street they get this look on their faces like someone has just died and they are very, very sorry.)

I was about to turn around and head home when Simon stopped and sniffed the air. I looked up and saw what Simon was sniffing at. There, standing right in the middle of the bridge, was Virginia.

Virginia isn’t as beautiful as William Shakespeare—her feathers are short and mostly brown and they don’t have eyes on them—but she is faster. Virginia is so fast that while we were chasing her I couldn’t think about anything except moving my legs. We chased her right across to The Other Side of Town—past The Very Nice Restaurant and the bank and the bus station—and the whole time I didn’t think about Diana or Buddhism or not going on Family Holiday even once. The whole time my brain only had one thought and that thought was run.

We chased Virginia all the way to the hospital. Next door to the hospital there is a small house with a fence all the way around it. Virginia flapped over the fence and behind the house and then we couldn’t chase her anymore, so we stopped. Simon was panting and I had a stitch, and for a minute my only thought was ouch. But then—when my stitch started to undo itself—I realised that the house wasn’t really a house at all. It was The Clinic.

Adults never say The Clinic in normal voices—they always whisper it or say it really fast like they want to get the words out before anybody notices. The Clinic is like a hospital, but for your brain instead of your body. I don’t know what doctors do in there—like if they use stethoscopes or tongue-sticks like regular doctors. But I do know that sometimes after people start going to The Clinic the doctors send them somewhere else. And after people go somewhere else they don’t always come back. I know this because Rhea Grimm (who is the tallest, meanest girl in Year Eight) used to have a dad. He used to do normal dad things, like buy the paper and drive a car and have coffee. I didn’t really know him, but Bloomsbury is a small town, so I used to see him around. Then one day he stopped doing dad things and started going to The Clinic. And a few weeks after that he stopped going to The Clinic and was just gone. I never see him around anymore.

Simon sniffed and pulled on his lead to get me to walk around the side of the fence. When I did we saw Virginia sitting in the top of a tall tree where the leaves were starting to turn brown. Simon barked and Virginia cried in her peacock way and something inside me sagged a little, like an old basketball. I was sagging partly because I knew we wouldn’t be able to make Virginia come down, but also partly because of a feeling I got from looking at The Clinic that I don’t know how to put into words.