Henry Pepper had had a stressful week.  Between that extra load of legal papers that management had clean forgotten to tell anyone they had to look over and sign until exactly the last minute, Sally constantly arranging meetings with the adoption people without checking with him first, and the sure knowledge that the car was on its last legs and he didn’t know where he was going to get the money for a new one, he’d barely had a chance to sit down.  But looming at the end of the week was the scariest thing of all.  He and Sally were going to take his kids out for dinner, sit them down, and tell them they’d decided to adopt another child.

Henry didn’t know how they were going to react to that- tears and jealousy, or just plain indifference?  Because, yeah, the kids were eighteen and nineteen, but nobody liked having their lives shaken up when they were counting on smooth sailing, did they?

Making things all the more complicated was the fact that it would be the first time Sally and Rosalyn had been in the same room for about two years, and Henry didn’t know if he trusted either of them not to make a scene.  Heaven knew Sally had come up with grand plans to confront Rosalyn over her perceived wrongdoing before now.  “I think there’s still a small part of her that isn’t happy about the choices she’s made,” Sally would say, “I say we try one more time.”  And then Henry would have to talk her down from showing up at Rosalyn’s school to expose the hollowness of her lifestyle.  If she’d pulled a stunt like that, it would have been exactly the excuse Henry’s ex-wife would have needed to completely deny him access.

He’d been pleasantly surprised that Rosalyn had even agreed to this dinner, but that didn’t mean he could drop his guard.  When they met the kids at the Taj Mahal, Henry had prepared himself for the two girls to glare at each other and instantly go on the warpath, probably egged on from the sides by Oliver.  But so far, it hadn’t happened.  They’d been here an hour, and both kids were making polite conversation, as if they and Sally had never had a screaming argument over a Franz Ferdinand CD.  Maybe this evening wouldn’t be so terrifying after all.

“So you’re a journalist now?” Henry asked Rosalyn as they finished off the naan bread.

“More like a publicist.”  Rosalyn looked better-groomed than Henry had seen her in years, with her hair neatly tucked back under a blue-and-mauve headband that matched her dress.  “People send me new messages every ten minutes.  It’s mad.”

Henry smiled.  He’d never heard of these ‘Kelpie and Silkie’ messages, but apparently they were a big thing around Berrylands.  Students had always found silly ways to amuse themselves, he supposed.  “But how do you know which ones are real and which ones are fake?”

“Well… they’re all real.  Even the ones they just wrote in the last thirty seconds.  If they exist, they’re real.”

“So you don’t care much about provenance?”

“I do, but I think the messages themselves are the important thing.”

Sally cleared her throat.  “If you ask me, they all just want to be part of something bigger than themselves.”

Rosalyn turned to Sally, and- wonders would never cease!- gave her a warm smile.  “Yeah, I think so, too.  It’s like my RE teacher said- ‘humans are by nature social.’  People form communities around anything they can find.”

Sally peered at Rosalyn over the top of her glasses.  “The funny thing about life is…”

“What if you start getting really weird ones?” Oliver interrupted, “Like if a Neo Nazi group gets hold of it?”

Rosalyn frowned.  “I don’t know.  I guess I’d have to start filtering some out.”

“The funny thing about life is,” Sally repeated, a little louder, “people can build a life around minutia, and forget what’s really important.”

Henry shut his eyes.  Here it came- the lecture.  Since Rosalyn had started university, Sally had made constant insinuating remarks about the student lifestyle she was sure Rosalyn was living.  Now here was her chance to turn her away from sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, and back to Jesus.

But Oliver interrupted again.  “Well, you’ve got the names of people who send you things, right?  If you get any Nazi ones, you can just report them to the university.”

“Yeah,” said Rosalyn.  Suddenly, her face brightened up.  “Oh, that reminds me!  My friend Mariam…”

Sally spoke over her.  “I think you need to think about your end goal in all of this.  Collecting little bits of graffiti?  It’s fun, I suppose, but is it really going to help you in later life?”

Oliver turned to her with a heavy-lidded, sage-like expression, and recited, “He knows not where he’s going / For the ocean will decide / It’s not the destination / It’s the glory of the ride.”

Henry looked over at Sally.  Her mouth had seized up like a cat’s bottom.  “Go ahead, Oliver!  Spend your whole life quoting birthday cards at people!  I’m sure that will lead to a fulfilling life!”

Henry put a hand on her arm.  “Sally…”

“I try so hard with you two!”  Henry heard her voice start to break.  “You want me to respect your beliefs, but you can never quite bring yourself to respect mine, can you?”

Henry didn’t know where to look.  Let’s have a nice family dinner, we said.  Reconnect with the kids, we said.

Rosalyn did her best to calm things down.  “I don’t think Oliver was being…”

“My faith doesn’t come from a birthday card!”  Definite tears in her eyes now.  People at nearby tables were looking around to see what all the hubbub was.  “It doesn’t come from some graffiti on a toilet wall!  And if you expect that to give you anything meaningful, then I feel sorry for you!”

Oliver’s voice almost a squeak.  “All I did was…”

“I feel sorry for you!”

There was a long pause.  Sally glared daggers at Oliver.  Rosalyn fidgeted.  And eventually the awkwardness got too much, and Henry cleared his throat and said, “Rosalyn, what were you saying about your friend Mariam?”

Apparently that was exactly the wrong thing to say, because Sally slammed her fork down on her plate, stood up, and stormed towards the exit.  The three of them sat open-mouthed, watching her go.

After a while, Oliver turned to Henry.  “All I did was quote the ‘Zen Dog’ poem!”

Henry sighed.  “I know, son.  I know.”

*

For the last year, Jonathan Lambton had worked constantly to try and get his little brother to come out of his shell.  It had taken them weeks just to persuade him to get out of bed for more than a few minutes at a time, and when they’d got him to come in and do some secretarial work at the theatre, it had felt like a triumph on the level of climbing Mount Everest.  Denny seemed to shrink back from anything new, hiding in his room or in the back of Jonathan’s office, doing his best to disappear.  Until this month, the only person he’d interacted with outside his family had been Alex Rudd.

But a couple of weeks ago, Octavia had told him about coming across Denny in the café downstairs, and seeing him sitting with Alex’s friend Isaac and one of the girls they lived with.  “It wasn’t him doing most of the talking, but he was definitely joining in,” she’d said, her eyes lit up, “Now, how long’s it been since he’s done that?  Even with us?”  It was true.  Denny often had to be prodded into conversation.  It was as if he thought anything he had to say would be the wrong thing.

So it wasn’t so surprising that Jonathan wanted to encourage Denny to spend more time with Alex’s friends.  It was a little more surprising that when his mother asked him to find a Berrylands student who’d be prepared to work for her part-time, he’d thought of them first.  But they were easy to get ahold of, and if you wanted to encourage one connection, it made sense to form others, right?  When Jonathan had asked Alex which of his friends was best suited to scanning things into a computer all day, he’d suggested Natalie.  So, Natalie it was.

“It’ll be six or seven weekends,” he explained to her in his office, “Maybe fewer, if you’re willing to work some weekdays as well.”

“Fantastic,” said Natalie, with a wide-eyed shrug.  She seemed a little tougher and more composed than some of Alex’s other friends, which was probably why he’d recommended her.  You needed a thick skin to deal with Josette Lambton.  “I’ve been looking for a part-time job since September, but I couldn’t find anything that fit around my lectures.  This’ll be great.”

Jonathan wondered if he should tell her that their mother’s initial idea had been for Octavia to do the work, and for free.  Octavia, who hadn’t spoken to their mother more than twice a year since she was sixteen, had laughed in Jonathan’s face when he’d asked her.

Instead, he said, “Now, this will involve you having to put up with my mother…”

“Couldn’t be worse than putting up with Alex’s mother,” said Natalie, with a grin.  Jonathan had to admit that was probably true.  His mother might not be the easiest person to deal with, but she’d never held somebody at gunpoint and smashed their head against a doorframe.  “What kind of things will I be sorting out?”

“Old family documents.  Invitations, newspaper articles, society pages.  My mother knew a lot of interesting people when she was younger, and she wants to document it.”

Natalie gave another happy shrug.  “Sounds good to me.”

Jonathan smiled.  You strengthened connections by building up additional ones.  Just as long as Natalie didn’t hate his guts in six weeks’ time.

*

Rosalyn had come by the theatre again.  This time, she wanted to tell him how her weekend had gone.  Denny didn’t have much to contribute- his weekend had gone the way it usually did, with plenty of visits to the mattress army- but he liked hearing her talk.  Her voice had a low, gentle sound to it.

Anyway, this weekend, Rosalyn and her brother had been out to dinner with their dad, and their stepmother had lost her temper and left the restaurant for no good reason halfway through the meal.  Rosalyn’s stepmother went to the kind of church that thought the Crusades had been a good idea.  “Not the killing,” explained Rosalyn.  Then she thought for a moment, and added, “Well, probably not.  But the bit where they were trying to convert everyone to Christianity by force- Sally and her friends would be all for that.”  Her face tightened in what was almost a scowl.  “They’d um and ah and I-know-it-sounds-terrible-but, but they’d definitely be in favour of invading the holy land.”

Denny nodded.  Pinder had never ummed and ahhed.  He’d just come out and said horrible things, whenever you were least prepared.  And before that thought could go away, before he could squeeze his eyes shut and tell himself that Pinder had had his reasons and he’d never get anywhere trying to make him into some sort of villain, Denny realised that he’d said it out loud.

“What kind of horrible things?” asked Rosalyn.

Something in his mind was still screaming at him to stop it, that this train of thought couldn’t lead anywhere good, but Rosalyn had already heard him.  There was no backing out now.  “Well, he’d wait until the end of a really hard day, or when you were sick, or when you’d just fallen out with someone, and then…”  Denny tried to call as many of them to mind as he could.  There had been a few.  “You’ll never really be happy.  I think you just need to accept that.”  He counted it off on his fingers.  “I think your problem is that you’re mediocre.  You’re just smart enough to have an ego about it.”  That one had been spooky- some of his teachers had said the exact same thing.  “You already know that no-one will ever really like you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be useful.”  Three was enough.  He didn’t want to dominate the conversation.

Rosalyn was quiet for a moment.  It was hard to read her expression.  “Did he just say that stuff to you, or to everyone?”

Denny’s first instinct as to say that of course it was just him, that he’d been a special case… but then he remembered hearing something Pinder had said to Jo.  Something about the marks on her legs.  Pathetic.  There are people in the world with real problems.  “Um…  I don’t know.  He didn’t usually say it where other people could hear.”

Rosalyn took a sip of her coffee, and looked off into the distance, thoughtful.  “I think…  I think Sally’s church assume that if something they say sounds terrible, that automatically makes it true.”

Denny smiled.  “Yeah.  Because they’re such wonderful people that they’d never dare say such terrible things unless they were completely convinced.”

Rosalyn held his gaze for a few seconds, studying him.  “Well, lots of people are absolutely certain but still wrong.”  She took another sip.  “And lots of people think they’re good, but aren’t.”

*

Natalie’s bedroom smelled of fruity shower gel and the bags of sweets she kept in her top drawer, which probably made it the most pleasant room in the house (Isaac’s room smelled of the weird starchy washing powder his mum had made him pack, for example.)  That was probably why they’d ended up there this afternoon.  While the TV played in the background (Natalie had put in one of her Comic Strip Presents DVDs), Mariam sat in the office chair by the window and read her new emails. 

Alex had given her fifteen names, Mariam had managed to find working email addresses for eight of them, and so far, two of them had replied.  The first guy, Colin Mitchell, had only really lived with them for a couple of months in 2001, but that had been long enough for Shaun Pinder to fuck up his degree by insisting that he fill his thesis with references to unrelated things that Shaun was supposedly an expert in.  Charity Stobart had lived with them for two and a half years, and her story was a lot scarier.  She’d annoyed Shaun somehow, and then, a couple of days later, she’d had horrible stomach pains just after lunch.  She managed to sneak off to the nearest A&E, where they pumped her stomach and found traces of a number of toxic substances.  “Not enough to have killed me by themselves, but definitely enough to stop me complaining for a while,” Charity had said.

“When did it happen?” asked Alex, who’d perched on the right arm of the chair.

Mariam checked the email.  “Last May.  That would have been not long after you got Denny out, right?”

Alex nodded.  “Did she say what happened afterwards?”

“Her parents made her move back in with them and cut off contact with Shaun and the others.  Can’t imagine she argued much.  The police didn’t manage to prove anything, apparently, but I bet that’s why they left Dorset and changed their name.”  Mariam looked back at the screen for a moment, then something occurred to her.  “Hey, do you think he’s done that before?  Changed the group’s name and moved them about when a scandal happened?”

Alex considered this.  “I don’t know.  He’d have only been in his early twenties when I first met him, though.  There wouldn’t have been him for him to go through too many identities.”

“So you don’t know his exact age, then?”

“No.”

As far as Mariam was concerned, that meant he could be any age at all.  Alex might have thought he’d been in his early twenties when they met, but there were some very fresh-faced thirty- and forty-year-olds.

Mariam hadn’t been sure to what extent the others had been listening to her and Alex’s conversation- the TV was on, and she and Alex were no French and Saunders- but just then, Natalie asked, “Do you know anything about his parents?  Or where he grew up?”

Alex sighed.  “He’d tell us different stories.  One week, he’d be talking about how oppressive and religious they were, and the next, they’d be free-thinking hippies who’d taught him all he knew.”

“So why did it take you so long to work out that he couldn’t be trusted?”  Mariam hadn’t originally planned to say this- just think it sarcastically- but, on reflection, it seemed like something that ought to be said.

Alex didn’t take offence.  “I’ve asked myself the same question.  I suppose part of it was that he never said anything that directly contradicted anything else- there are religious hippies, and I guess most parents are oppressive in some areas and free-thinking in others.  But that’s really just splitting hairs.  I think the main reason was that it’s easy to overlook things when you’re already emotionally invested in someone.  If you notice something that doesn’t fit, you rationalise it.”

Well, that was basically Mariam’s entire romantic history on a nutshell, so she accepted it.  “Jonathan Lambton said ‘Mandeville’ was his mother’s maiden name…”

“Really?  Maybe he did some research of his own.  We should talk to him.”

“What, you think he might have hired a private detective?”

Alex shrugged.  “More likely he just asked around and found out what he could.  Just like we’re doing now, in our own way.”

Isaac leaned back against the bed.  “Bet you anything he heard a lot of stories about him torturing small animals and setting fire to stuff.”

“That’s serial killers,” said Natalie, “Not cult leaders.”

“They’re not that different.”

Mariam wished they wouldn’t say stuff like that.  She was worried enough already.  For a moment, she thought about saying, Guys, stop it- you’re upsetting Peps, but she decided against it because of the very real possibility that Peps would turn around and say, No, they’re not.  That would be embarrassing.

“I don’t know about that,” said Alex, “but maybe he knows the area that Shaun grew up in.  There might be family members we can talk to.”

Isaac looked round.  “What are you going to do with all this research once you’ve finished?”

“Dunno.”  Mariam closed her laptop.  “Just have to hope that knowledge really is power, I suppose.”

*

Natalie had half-expected the door to be answered by a maid or a butler in full uniform, but no- Mama Lambton opened it herself.  She shook their hands, then took them through the hallway, pointing out pictures and items she thought they should see.

“Meiji Period,” she explained, jabbing her finger at a painting of a group of Japanese girls sitting under a tree, “1908.”  She looked at Natalie as if she was challenging her to say something.

“Right,” said Natalie, doing her best to sound impressed.  As opposed to how she really felt, which was completely out of her depth.  Mama Lambton was quite an elegant old lady, with her silver hair and neat designer suit, but the way she spoke and looked at you made it seem as if she was constantly trying to pick a fight.

Apparently disappointed, Mama Lambton turned away and led them into the living room.  “Them” being Natalie and Jonathan, who’d given her a lift into Richmond so she wouldn’t have to catch the bus.  And probably so she wouldn’t have to face his mother on her own.

The living room wasn’t huge, but it was covered with little details and designs in the furniture and rugs and wall hangings that told you even the smallest thing cost more than your house.  Mama Lambton sat down in a pink armchair that looked more like a throne.  “Sit, sit,” she told them, waving a hand.  Jonathan perched on the sofa, and Natalie joined him.  The whole room smelled of dust and dried flowers.

Mama Lambton fixed her eye on Natalie and took a deep breath.  “May I ask how old you are?”  She sounded almost sarcastic, as if she’d asked Natalie a question before and got her head bitten off.

“Nineteen last month,” said Natalie, making sure to sit upright and fold her hands politely in her lap.  This was definitely not the kind of house where you sprawled all over the sofa, even if you weren’t here for a job interview.

Mama Lambton snorted.  “Nineteen?  Appreciate this time while it lasts, then.  I can safely inform you that the rest of your life will be a complete anti-climax.”

 Jonathan leaned forward.  “Natalie’s studying English Literature, Moth…”

“Age takes everything from you,” continued Mama Lambton, raising her voice to drown out her son, “Good looks, vitality, friendship.  Mark my words- no sooner does a flower bloom, but it starts to wither.”

A thought popped into Natalie’s head.  She thinks she’s acting in a play.

“You’re not withered, Mother,” said Jonathan patiently.

“In my opinion, all artists should be shot at the age of twenty-five to avoid disappointment.”  She chuckled.  The same goes for athletes, but then I think they should be shot on general principle.”

Natalie thought about bringing up Johnny Cash or Ian McKellen, wondered if it would be worth it, and quickly decided it wouldn’t.  Instead, she said, “Jonathan says you used to know a lot of artists…?”

Mama Lambton waved her right hand in the air, holding an imaginary cigarette.  She definitely thinks she’s in a play, thought Natalie.  “Yes, ‘used to’ is the key word, isn’t it?  Because we actually had artists back then, not just dullards selling their unmade beds to galleries.  I don’t suppose you’ve ever even…”

“I think what Natalie was saying, Mother,” said Jonathan (getting his own back for her talking over him a minute ago), “is that you knew a lot of interesting people, and it’s worth documenting.”

Mama Lambton sighed.  “Is anything truly worth documenting?  The past is the past.  All you can do is present it to the younger generation and hope they might take an interest.”

Suddenly, Natalie remembered what she’d said when Shaun had asked them to the Oakmen meeting.  We have got to go.  I want to see just how much of a trainwreck this can be.

*

Mariam tried to hide it from her, standing in front of the phonebox and blocking the message, but it was too late.  Rosalyn saw.

A few seconds ago, they’d been languidly walking to university, listening to Isaac explain why he thought all Bratz dolls would someday come to life and kill their owners.  Rosalyn had been laughing.  She hadn’t thought…

And then she’d seen it.  Written across the window of the phonebox on the corner, in white paint or Tippex.  Save the world, stab a spastic- Kelpie and Silkie.

The air went right out of her lungs.  She read the words, and then read them again, trying to make them mean something different.

Isaac shot an arm out and pointed at it.  “That wasn’t there yesterday!” he said quickly, for Rosalyn’s benefit, “Mariam, you saw it, right?  It definitely wasn’t there yesterday!”

Rosalyn read the words over and over, trying to absorb them properly.  If she read them enough times, the shock would go away.  They’d sink into her mind and become part of the general background of what she knew about the world.  The deeper they sunk, the duller the pain would get.

“Someone must have come along last night and written it!  They’d have known we were going to be coming this way in the morning!”

“OK, Rosalyn, I think you need to sit down, alright?  Sit down and breathe a bit.  Come on.”

Save the world, stab a spastic.  Save the world, stab a spastic.  Save the world, stab a spastic.

Well, of course, thought Rosalyn, barely noticing as Mariam manoeuvred her towards a nearby bench, You didn’t think Kelpie and Silkie were going to be kind, did you?  You didn’t think you could actually trust them?

Isaac was pacing about, still ranting about something, and Mariam was crouching in front of her, telling her to lower her head and take deep breaths.  But all Rosalyn could think about were those words.

You brought this on yourself.  Who pins all their hopes on some random stranger who writes notes on walls?

She lowered her head all the way.  She stared at the pavement.

Pathetic.  Delusional.  Stupid.

August 2002

They had limited access to running water.  They lived mostly on a small supply of fruits and root vegetables.  They were squatting in an abandoned campsite, and it was freezing in winter.  And yet, Alex didn’t think he’d ever been happier.

“All those years, we thought we needed stuff,” said Virgil, cracking open a can of Stella.  The three of them- Virgil, Bradley and Alex- were sitting on the veranda outside the meeting house (which was, essentially, just a big version of the cabins everybody slept in), listening to ‘Knights in White Satin.’  One of the few CDs they had was The Best 60s Album in the World, Ever, and they’d been listening to it on a loop since June.  It seemed appropriate.  The people who’d written those songs had wanted to change the world, too.

“I remember being a kid,” Virgil continued, “thinking I would die if I didn’t get a skateboard for Christmas.  Ridiculous!  That was what was keeping me up at night!”

The sun was setting.  Part of the reason they’d come out was to watch the sky and see which colours the clouds turned before it got too dark to see.  It was different every evening.  Alex had never really appreciated that until he’d got here.

He sent a letter to Roxanne every month.  If the rest of them wanted to know what he was doing, they could just talk to her.

Across the clearing, by the toilets, Alex spotted the new guy.  “Denny!” he called, waving.  Denny looked up and waved back.  “Come on over!”

Denny rushed up to them in an eager little trot.  He’d been here for a couple of weeks now.  Pinder was still declaring him to be his new best friend.  A true thinker.  A real poet.  He’s going to make the world sit up and listen.

Alex didn’t know if he agreed with that, but he liked Denny, too.  He was kind of upper-crust, but not in an obnoxious way.  He looked at everything with wide eyes, drinking it all in with every second.  It was as if he’d been locked in a tower his whole life, and now he was finally getting to see the world.

As Denny approached, ‘Knights in White Satin’ turned into ‘Blackberry Way,’ as if it was his theme music announcing his presence.  “Hi guys!” he chirped, “What are you drinking?”

“Whatever we can find,” said Bradley, with a laugh.  It was true- they had a pile of cans of various different brands and ages.  It was entirely possible that some of them were years past their sell-by date.  “Go on, take your pick.”

Denny rooted through the pile, picked out a tall can of John Smiths, and settled own beside Bradley.

“This is living properly,” declared Virgil, “This is getting it right.”  He shook his head and laughed.  “All these years, philosophers and intellectuals have been losing sleep wondering…  And we could have just told them.”

Alex shut his eyes, and felt the breeze on his face.  The Rhymers had everything they needed.  They grew their own food.  They made their own clothes.  They were working to change the minds of the rest of the world.  There was nowhere Alex would rather have been, and nothing else he’d have rather been doing.

October 1996

It was early evening, and Mariam was looking out of the window at the end of the upstairs hallway, trying to see what Mrs Simon was up to. 

It was probably the first time she’d had a moment to herself all week.  Last Wednesday, Aunt Leila had shown up out of the blue and asked Mariam’s parents if her daughters (Jana, the older one, and Kia, who was the same age as Mariam) could come and stay while she sorted a few things out to do with her house.  That meant that Mariam was sleeping on a mattress on the floor while Kia took her bed, but she didn’t care.  Mariam had spent her entire life living with three brothers- having their cousins here meant that there were finally as many girls in the house as boys.  Everything felt just a little bit fairer with them around.

The window at the end of the hallway was tiny, and you had to stand on your toes and lean on the bookcase to see through it,  but once you did, you could see Mrs Simon’s whole house.  She lived across the road, and she was probably the most glamorous woman Mariam had ever seen.  She had long black hair and sparkling silver jewellery, and she painted a lot.  She was standing on the balcony at the side of the house, smoking a cigarette (Mariam knew you weren’t supposed to smoke, but Mrs Simon didn’t seem to do it that often, so it was probably OK.)  In the dark, you could only really see her silhouette, an outline in dark blue, and she looked like she was on a movie poster.

Jana’s voice echoed up from the dining room.  “Mariam!  We’re going to play Sardines!”

You couldn’t say no to that.  Mariam took one last look at Mrs Simon, and headed off downstairs.

*

The next day, Mariam showed Kia the view from the window.  Mrs Simon up on the balcony again, but this time she was painting at her easel.

“So is she a famous artist or something?” asked Kia, shouldering Mariam to the side a little so she could see better.

“Maybe,” said Mariam.

“Well, either she is or she isn’t.  Have you ever heard of her?”  (Kia had sworn up and down that she hadn’t been crying last night, no matter what Mariam thought she’d heard.  Mariam had dropped it, but decided to try and cheer her up anyway.)

“Well, no, but I don’t know many famous artists.  Just the ones we learn about in school, and most of them are dead.  Mrs Simon could have pictures hanging in galleries all over the world, and we just haven’t heard about it.”

“Hm,” said Kia.

Mariam stretched sideways, trying for a different angle so she could see what Mrs Simon was painting, but gave up when she realised it was just making her neck hurt.  And she couldn’t just knock on Mrs Simon’s door and ask to see her paintings, because that would be weird.  She just had to hope that she’d turn the easel around one of these days.

*

It was three in the morning, and Mariam had been woken up by Kia’s snores.  She trudged to the toilet, and then, on the way back to her room, looked out of the window at the back of the hallway, just in case something was going on.

(Kia had been sleeping in her bed for three weeks now.  Mariam didn’t quite dare to ask Mum and Dad where Auntie Leila was, in case she didn’t like the answer.)

She hadn’t expected to see anything, and at first, she didn’t.  Then somebody walked up to the driveway to Mrs Simon’s house, and Mariam realised it was Mrs Simon herself.

She was walking in a strange, squiggly pattern, almost tripping over and bumping into things.  Mariam looked closer, and saw that she had bare feet.  She was carrying her shoes in her hand- they must have got uncomfortable while she was walking home.

 Mariam watched her get the door open and close it behind her.  And once Mrs Simon was safely indoors, Mariam went back to bed.

*

Mrs Simon was having a party this evening.  Mariam had been watching the guests arrive for about half an hour.  They drove up and parked their cars on the kerb or in the driveway, and got out in their black suits and long white gowns, shining like movie stars at the Oscars.  It was impossible to look away.

You couldn’t hear the music properly through the wall- you could just hear that the music was there.  Mariam tried to imagine the kind of tune that would be suitable for a party like this.  Grand opera singers.  Sultry saxophones.  Neat little pianos that you could tuck away behind the champagne fountain.  Mariam could barely even imagine the kind of thing that might happen at a party like Mrs Simon’s- what they’d do, what they’d hear, what they’d talk about- but she was happy to watch it, just a little longer.

*

The only reason Mariam saw any of it was that she was the only one upstairs.  Kia, Jana and the boys were in the front room, watching telly.  Mum and Dad were out front talking to a delivery guy.  And Mariam had just gone up to fetch a book from her room when the phone rang.

It was six in the evening- not full dark yet, but getting there.  Mariam, remembering Dad’s lectures on the environment and electricity bills, hadn’t turned on any of the hallway lights.  The streetlamps were shining through the window at the end, and that was enough to see by.  Before she heard the phone, Mariam had been meaning to take a look through and see how Mrs Simon’s party was going.

She dashed into Mum and Dad’s room and picked up the receiver from the set on the bedside table.  “Hello- Gharib family?”

“Mariam!  It’s me- it’s Auntie Leila!”

Mariam blinked, and stood there stupidly for a moment.  “Auntie Leila?”

“Listen, I can’t talk long, but…”

“Hang on- let me get Dad!”  She didn’t want to put the phone down, not if Leila really didn’t have long, but if they wanted to know anything about where Leila had been for the last three weeks, then Dad was definitely the one who needed to ask the questions.

“No!” snapped Leila.  Then, less harshly, “I don’t have time to…  Just tell him I’m alright.  I’ll be away for a while, but I’m alright.  Will you tell him that for me?”

“OK, but when are you coming back?” asked Mariam.  But it was no good.  Auntie Leila had already hung up.  Almost on instinct, Mariam dialled 1471, meaning to write down the number and see what Mum and Dad could do with it, but all she got was a recorded message saying that the number had been withheld.

Nothing for it but to go downstairs and tell Mum and Dad what had just happened.  But, since there was no way of getting back in touch and therefore probably no rush, Mariam stopped on the way and looked out of the window.

Mrs Simon was on the balcony round the side of the house.  Mariam thought she’d probably come out to have a cigarette.  She moved to the side, to get a better look at exactly what Mrs Simon was doing, and noticed something strange.  She was climbing onto the safety barrier.  In a moment, she was standing right on top of it.

Later, Mariam would marvel at how stupid she’d been for not working out what was going to happen.  But in the moment, all she could think about was how angry Mum had been when her brother Sadiq had tried to climb out of his bedroom window last month, and how she hoped Mrs Simon knew what she was doing.

Apparently she did.  Mrs Simon set her feet apart, took a breath, and jumped.

*

Every day for the next few months, Mariam went out of her way to walk past the house across the road and glance into the window.  But she never saw Mrs Simon again.

Her dad said that Mrs Simon must have still been alive when they drove her to hospital, otherwise they wouldn’t have put the ambulance siren on.  He said that the second floor balcony wasn’t very high up, so there was no reason to assume that she’d have got any injuries she couldn’t recover from.  Mariam wanted to believe him.  But the house stayed empty for most of the next year, and then the “For Sale” sign went up.  That seemed like an end to it.

A couple of years later, a crack appeared in the window at the end of the hallway, and Mariam’s parents decided to have it boarded up.  She was almost relieved.

The End

Mariam had heard that you could find most things on the internet, if you knew where to look.  Time to find out if that was true.

She had a couple of hours between the end of her seminar and the start of her shift, and she’d decided to spend it in the library, getting whatever she could out of those damn computers.  Shaun Pinder Oakmen.  Shaun Mandeville Oakmen.  She typed in the terms and she combed through the results, trying to see what led where.  And she couldn’t relax, not for one second, no matter how much her muscles ached with the tension.  She was still on edge from last night.

Mariam hadn’t minded Natalie coming through the door with a triumphant shout of, “Boom!  Look who I found!”  She’d texted ahead, so they’d all known she was bringing Alex.  That wasn’t a problem.

No, the problem had come an hour later, after Alex sat them around the kitchen table and explained everything.  Mariam, after having been calm for quite a while, was suddenly compelled to get to her feet and rip him to shreds.

“So, to recap,” she’d told Alex, “Your friends get injured by a bomb.  Then, a little while later, you find out that your old bomb-throwing pals are in town and stalking us.  But instead of telling us about this and letting us do what we could with that information, you piss off to hide in Brighton for two weeks.”

Alex sighed.  “Mariam, I’m…”

“While leaving us a cryptic message on the laundry room wall, where we may or may not have ever seen it.  Sorry, I forgot about that.  That was your big insurance policy, was it?”

Alex waited a second or two to check that she’d finished, then said, “You’re right.  I didn’t handle this at all well.  I’m sorry.”

“Why, though?  Why did any of that seem like a good idea?”

“Because I was underestimating you.  And underestimating Shaun, too.  I thought that if I let sleeping dogs lie…”

“You thought that we were a bunch of stupid kids who shouldn’t bother our silly little heads about grown-up things.”

She’d intended that to needle and provoke him, but he just carried on looking sad.  “I suppose I must have.  Not that I ever thought any of you were stupid, but…”  His face twisted a little.  “You aren’t much older than I was when I first met Pinder.  And I wanted to keep you as far away from him as possible.”

“You could have done that by tellingme how you knew he was bad news.  Instead of just dropping hints that maybe he put that first guy up to it.”

Alex nodded.  “I should have trusted you.”  He looked around.  “I should have trusted all of you.  I’m sorry.”

After that, the argument had more or less petered out, because there was only so much energy you could muster to yell at someone who just apologised and agreed with everything you said.  It didn’t help that none of the others had backed her up.  She’d thought she could at least count on Isaac taking her side.

Well, fine.  She’d knuckle down and do her research, and see if that made her teeth stop grinding.

It took a while before she got anything, but eventually she found an article in some local paper from May 2004- by Alex’s account, not long after he’d left.  Self-improvement group raise £2000 for town hall.  They were still calling themselves The Rhymers then, but Mariam definitely thought she recognised a couple of people in the photo.  “Every little helps”- (l-r) Joy Wellington, Charity Stobart, Shaun Pinder, Bradley Simmons.

 “Enjoying yourself?” said a voice by Mariam’s ear.  She knew it was Adrian before she even turned around.  Even if she hadn’t recognised his voice, the ham and onions on his breath was unmistakable.

He was standing by the next computer as if he was about to sit down and use it, but he was leaning over Mariam as if that wasn’t going to happen for another few minutes.  His hair looked even more of a mess than usual- you could have hidden a badger in some of those tangles.  “Looking up anything interesting?”  He smiled, catching his lower lip between his teeth, as if he was assessing what was on her screen and finding it to be below his standards.

“Nothing much,” said Mariam.  Her first instinct had been to cover up the screen, but why?  She’d already reported the Oakmen to the police.  If she was looking for more information on them, it wasn’t exactly a state secret.  “What are you up to?”  She’d almost said, What do you want?, but then she’d decided not to pick a fight before the working day had even started.

“Been reading a forum.”  He swung himself down onto the seat instead of just crouching like a normal person, and logged onto the computer in front of him.  “There’s an ex-policeman posting about all the things he used to see in his work.”

“Right,” said Mariam, and turned back to the screen.  That woman in the photo- the skinny one with the glasses and the sticky-out teeth- she’d definitely introduced herself as ‘Jo’ at the meeting, right?  But the caption called her ‘Joy’ instead.  Easy mistake to make, Mariam supposed.

“Like, one time he had to find some kids who’d got lost in the woods…”  Adrian breathed in sharply and shook his head, still smiling.  “They found two of them under a bridge.  It turned out they’d got hold of some berries that made them cough out blood and die.  They were only a few yards away from the main road.”  He shook his head again, tutting.  “That should give you some idea of it.”

“Mm,” said Mariam.  She’d typed Jo Wellington into the search bar.  She didn’t know if she’d have any luck- if the paper had screwed up her first name, then it might have screwed up her last name as well- but it was as good a place to start as any.

The third result had a picture next to it.  She had her hair down, but it was definitely her.  Appeal for information: Joelle “Jo” Wellington.

“But the thing about that story is, there was actually a third kid, and he survived.  They found him wandering in the woods a little while later.  He said he’d tried to stop the other two from eating the berries, but they just told him to mind his own business.  And he realised that he had to go on ahead, to save himself.”  Here came that tutting noise again.  “And the policeman said that the dead kids’ parents, they tried to make out that he’d done something wrong, leaving his friends behind.  But the policeman- the one who started the thread- he said the kid had done the right thing.  And all the other police agreed.  ‘Cause the sad truth is, there isn’t always a nice answer.  Sometimes you have to do hard things.”

The article was from 2001.  The parents of missing schoolgirl Joelle Wellington have appealed to anyone with information on their daughter’s whereabouts to come forward.  Joelle, 15, who is known to her friends and family as “Jo,” failed to return home from an after-school club on Friday.  Friends have described her as…

So, she’d be twenty now.  And for all Mariam knew, she’d been in touch with her parents since this, and put their minds at rest.  Still… definitely worth bringing up with the police.  They’d been given a case number on Tuesday- Mariam would just ring the non-emergency line and ask.

 She could smell Adrian’s breath again.  He made that tutting sound right in her ear.  “2001?  Yeah, she’s dead.  They’re deluding themselves if they think otherwise.”

“Could be,” said Mariam, logging off, “Listen, I’ll see you at work, OK?  I just need to make a pho…”

“The world’s a lot uglier than people like to tell themselves,” said Adrian, “You can take that to the bank.”

“Sure,” said Mariam.  She picked up her stuff and went out to use her phone.

“It doesn’t just go away if you don’t think about it!” Adrian called after her.

*

Mariam was inside the house with the green blinds.  They’d all been summoned there this afternoon to discuss “the plan.”  Whatever that was.

Russel, a big guy with a square head, was standing by the fireplace, pontificating.  “I bet you didn’t know I was on telly back in the Eighties.”

“Were you?” asked Isaac, probably just because he was the one Russel had been looking at when he said it.

“I was!”  Russel laughed.  “God’s honest truth!  Ask your Mum and Dad about Traffic Lights.  They’ll remember.  I was rubbing shoulders with all the greats.  But, you know, it’s all fake.  It’s all acting with them.  I realised that early on and got out.”

Mariam out her drink down.  She was trying not to touch the table- it felt weirdly weirdly sticky.  Natalie and Peps had shared a few details of their own visit to the green blinds house, but they’d left out the stickiness, and the smell in the background, like something sweet that had just started to go off.  There was also the way that all the surfaces gleamed, as if they’d been laminated.  The table, the chairs, the mantelpiece- all of it.  On sunny days, it must have been enough to make you go blind.

Just to her left, Alex was watching Russel curiously, as if he was studying him.  Mariam had brought up the Jo thing with him, and if she’d ever got back in touch with her parents, he hadn’t heard about it.  He hadn’t known that she’d been so young or that she’d had people out looking for her, but he hadn’t been very surprised to hear it, either.  “Denny and I were both still in school when Shaun recruited us,” he’d told her, “Though we were a year or two older.”  That had almost sent Mariam into another tirade about why he hadn’t reported Shaun to every legal authority he could find, but she’d bitten her tongue and stopped herself.  No use having the same argument two days in a row.  What was done was done.

Russel was still banging on about his TV career.  “I think I managed to maintain my character throughout it all, but some of them…  Disgusting people.  Disgusting people.”  He looked out of the window for a moment, then turned back to Isaac.  “So, the plan.  What I had in mind was, you, me and him” – he nodded towards Alex, without looking at him- “take turns standing watch.  Standing guard.”  He pointed outside.  “That tree just outside your front drive?  Perfect hiding spot.  One of us stands there with an old wooden cricket bat from ten ‘til six.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Alex.

 Russel turned and stared at him in disbelief, as if it was Remembrance Day and he’d just burped in the middle of the two minutes’ silence.

Before Russel or Alex could say anything, Natalie spoke up.  “Wouldn’t it make more sense for all five of us to take turns?”

Mariam gave her a look.

“I didn’t say it was a good idea!” Natalie protested, “I just didn’t think it was fair to make the boys do all the work!”

Russel ignored this.  “And what exactly do you not approve of?” he asked Alex, pronouncing each word carefully as if he was desperately trying to hold his temper steady.

In Mariam’s opinion, Alex did a much better job of getting that impression across, just by raising his voice and lowering his brows a tiny amount.  “I just don’t think it will help.  Shaun Pinder doesn’t usually go for direct, physical violence.  He prefers to…”

“So I’m lying, am I?” Russel suddenly roared, sweeping his arms through the air, “I didn’t see them light those torches?  They weren’t trying to burn your house down?”

“I’m sure they were!  But…”

“And if they come around and start threatening those girls?  That’ll be OK, will it?”

Mariam heard herself speak before she’d even decided to.  “For fuck’s sake, they’ve already threatened us!  They’ve already done more than that!”  She stood up, avoiding the sticky table.  “They set a bomb in the park and it nearly blew us up!  You can’t stop bombs from going off by hitting them with a cricket bat!”

Russel turned to her.  “Oh!  Oh!  And if…”  But Mariam didn’t hear the rest of it, because she was already out of the door.

She didn’t even know what had made her get so angry so quickly.  Leftover anger at Alex from last night?  Maybe, but Alex was the one Russel had been yelling at!  If anything, she should have wanted to join in!

Mariam crossed the road towards Pallas House… then turned around, hearing voices behind her.  Natalie and Isaac were running towards her, trying to catch up.  She wondered why Alex and Peps hadn’t come.  Maybe they’d needed someone to stay and distract Russel.

The three of them met up on the corner, just by the tree Russel had mentioned.  As soon as he got close enough to whisper, Isaac shook his head and said, “What.  A weirdo.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Mariam.  The oily way he’d said “those girls.”  The way he’d acted like he had the solution to all their problems when all he’d come up with was take a bat and hit things with it.  The fact that she hadn’t even wanted to spend her afternoon in his weird, sticky living room, but oh no, he knew best.

“I don’t think I even know how to hold a cricket bat,” said Isaac, trying to make her laugh.  It didn’t work.  She felt too churned-up for that.

Natalie gave Mariam a little smile.  “Sorry.  I shouldn’t have encouraged him.”

“Ha.  You had a point.”  Mariam put her hands in her pockets for warmth.  “We can probably swing a cricket bat better than he can.”

Across the road, there was a bit of noise outside the house with the green blinds.  Russel stood in the doorway, making outraged noises, while Alex and Peps talked him down and gradually inched towards the pavement.  So they had stayed behind to distract him.  Mariam smiled.

She watched as they finally managed to wave away the last of Russel’s and-another-things and escape.  Alex waved to Mariam and the others as he and Peps jogged towards them.  Mariam didn’t know if it was Alex’s self-control that was preventing him from breaking into a terrified run, or just his dodgy leg.

As soon as the five of them were together, Mariam made an announcement.  “We are never going into that house again.  The man’s a lunatic.”

She didn’t get any disagreements.  It occurred to Mariam that this was the second time in a fortnight that they’d collectively stormed out of a building after their host started talking nonsense.  Probably best not to make a habit of it.  They did still have to sit through lectures, after all.

Russel had been right about one thing (exactly one thing)- they needed to be more proactive about protecting themselves from Shaun Pinder.  And, possibly, protecting other people.  Getting them banned from the university grounds had been a good start.  “Alex, we’re going to the police tomorrow morning, right?  About the Jo thing?”

“Absolutely,” said Alex.

 “Well, after that, can you try and put together a list of all the people you remember from when you lived with them?” She frowned. “Current members, former members…  I want to see if we come across any other big secrets like Jo’s.”  It was more than that- if they’d brainwashed Alex, Denny and Jo while they were still in school, then they’d probably targeted a lot of other vulnerable people.  Maybe some of them had family that could be tracked down.

*

Jo was still upstairs, snuffling, but Shaun had called a house meeting anyway.  He’d given himself half an hour to decide how to play this, and by now he had a couple of ideas.

He’d half-expected the police to show up again.  He hadn’t expected them to ask for Jo, especially not by her full name.  She’d been signing herself Jo Pinder for the last couple of years, just to avoid that.  Anyway, the police had taken her down to the station and made her account for the last five years, and now they had to worry about the possibility that her parents would be in touch.

“It was Alex and his friends, wasn’t it?” asked Debbie, her eyes flashing with fire.  There were six of them in the conservatory.  Everyone except for Maya, who was in the next room, playing a video for her kids, and Jo herself.  “They dug up all the dirt they could, and they found something they could use against us.  They’ve basically told her abusers where she is.”

Shaun remembered Jo’s parents- two whiny, unimaginative trolls skulking around their shabby council house like rats in a sewer.  Definitely not the kind of people they wanted around.  “It… seems quite likely, yes.”

“But Jo was Alex’s friend!” Wade protested.  He was a blond, broad-shouldered man who looked as if he’d have been at home on a Viking longboat, but this had horrified him practically to tears.  “I remember when he was here- they liked each other!  They used to play cards together!”  Wade looked around the room.  “How could he treat her like this?  What’s he getting out of it?”

Debbie spat.  “He’s just fucking vile, simple as that.  And to think we took him in when he needed us.”

I took him in, thought Shaun, Not you.  You weren’t even here yet.

“But who the fuck do they think they are?” asked Greg (who’d been Shaun’s second when he’d first introduced himself to Mariam), “Do other people not matter to them anymore?  Is that how he’s got them thinking?”

“That’s how he’s got them thinking,” confirmed Debbie, “It’s messed.  Up.”

Bradley thumped his fist on the table.  “You know what?  No more pussy-footing around.  We mix up a bucket of chlorine and household bleach, and pipe it through their letterbox.  Gas them like the vermin they are.”

An odd silence descended.  No-one contradicted Bradley, but they all seemed to edge away from him.

“We’re all going to have to face it one of these days!” insisted Bradley, “It’s the only language they understand!”

Shaun was going to have to do something about Bradley.  If he was going to go around talking about gassing people to death and waving torches at their houses (“I was just trying to scare them!”), then he could do it without the Oakmen’s protection.  The police were bothering them enough without being able to trace something like that to them.  “Not now,” he told Bradley, “I have a different plan.  I’ve been in touch with some other Berrylands students, and it turns out Alex and his friends are not popular.”

“Surprise, surprise,” muttered Debbie.

“And there’s something else.”  Shaun nodded towards Viv Fontaine, the only person in the room who hadn’t spoken yet.  She was a hunched little thing with buck-teeth and an unflattering bob.  “While Viv was on campus, she managed to pick up a copy of the university paper.  Viv, can you read us what you found?”

This was the important thing.  If you looked hard enough, you’d always find a weakness.  Everyone had a chink in their armour.  With Alex, it had been his mummy issues.  With Mariam it was the way she’d pissed off her co-workers without even realising it.  And then there was this.

Viv stood up, looked around the room, and clutched the paper to her chest.  “It’s called ‘The Bell,’” she said in her mushy, lisping drawl.  She opened it up, folded it back, and began to read.  “On the Trail of Kelpie and Silkie, by Rosalyn Pepper.”

March 2000

There was a girl in Alex’s fundraising group named Melanie Spencer, and his heart gave a painful lurch whenever he saw her.  Her eyes were huge, with dark shadows underneath, her face was just a little too thin, and her hair was long and tangled.  Alex was worried about her.  There was something wrong- he just didn’t know what it was.

Every Friday night, they’d stand on the station concourse, rattling their tins and collecting for this month’s charity, and every twenty minutes, Alex would look around to see where Melanie was.  Usually she’d be in a group with two or three other girls from her class, and Alex would relax.  Sometimes, though, she’d wander off to the side on her own, and then Alex would try to keep an eye on her.  Nothing too overbearing- just making sure that he intercepted any drunken middle-aged businessmen he saw heading her way.  Sometimes he even managed to get them to put a few pounds in the collection tin.

Alex didn’t think he’d ever heard her speak.

*

Alex had eighteen months left until he could go away to university, and sometimes he wondered how he’d get through it.

He had fundraising on Friday, Maths tutoring on Wednesday and Thursday, football on Sunday, school council on Monday and his shift at the residential home on Saturday.  That still left Tuesday afternoons stuck in the house.

Marley was in the front room, playing Resident Evil and occasionally muttering curses as a zombie dodged his attack.  He sat back, slouched, with his legs spread wide, and he looked as though he was trying to merge with the sofa.  There was a strong smell of smoky bacon crisps in the air.

Alex sat in the chair opposite, making some notes for his English coursework.  He could have done it in his bedroom or the dining room, but he preferred to have company.  Marley was concentrating too hard on his game to say much, but at least he was there.

Angry, raised voices came through the ceiling.  Alex caught his breath.  Ancient Romans and their many methods of killing people.  “Do you know what they’re arguing about?”

Marley didn’t turn around.  “Oh.  Apparently Serena complained to Dad about something.  Then Dad talked to Mum about it, and now her feelings are all hurt.”

Alex nodded.  Their father had lived in Ireland for nearly three years now.  They talked on the phone, but none of them had ever visited.

The voices went on for a while.  Alex did his best to forget about it and concentrate on what was in front of him, and he thought he sensed Marley doing the same thing.  Then one of the upstairs doors slammed open, and the argument spilled down the stairs and into the hallway.

“I’m sorry I don’t have time for your sick little power play!” Mum spat from the landing.  Alex wasn’t going to go out and see.  He was just going to concentrate on his English notes.

“You don’t have time?!  What, in your busy schedule of sitting on your arse all day?”

“How dare you?”  Alex heard Mum’s footsteps on the stairs, but Serena was too quick for her.  The front door had already slammed shut behind her by the time Mum was halfway down.

Alex badly needed to find something to do on Tuesdays.

*

The weather was miserable that morning.  Alex drove through the rain, doing his best to account for the poor visibility and slippery roads, when he spotted a hunched figure in the distance, up against all the grey.  It was Melanie Spencer.

He pulled up to the curb a little way behind her, so that he could be sure that he wouldn’t hit a puddle and splash her.  She didn’t see him until he wound down his window and called out to her.  “Would you like a lift?”

A smile slowly spread across her face, as if she had to test the waters before fully committing to it.  “Thanks!”

It was all simple- you saw a classmate struggling in the rain, so you offered them a lift to school because it was the decent thing to do- right up until Melanie had sat down and closed the door behind her, and Alex remembered that he’d never actually talked to her before.  To the best of his recollection, that little thanks was probably the first word she’d ever spoken to him.  And now he didn’t know where to start.  Do you live around here?  No.  He’d sound like he was prying.

He cleared his throat.  “Would you like the radio on?”

She shrugged, still smiling.  “I don’t mind.”  She looked at the windscreen for a while, her eyes seeming to follow one particular raindrop as it travelled, then said, “Is Marley Rudd your brother?”

Alex started a little.  “Yes, he is.  Do you know him?”

Melanie nodded.  “I used to help run the Drama Club last term.  You know, during lunchtimes.  And Marley always came up with great ideas for things his group could do.  He seemed like a smart kid.”

“Well, thanks for saying that.  I’ll tell him you said hi.”  Alex remembered Marley mentioning Drama Club a few times last year, but he was almost certain that he didn’t go anymore.  Marley seemed to have checked out of a lot of things lately.

“You look alike, you know,” said Melanie.

Alex laughed.  “Really?”

“Yeah.  Around the eyes and nose.”  Melanie circled her own eyes and nose with her index finger.  “I haven’t seen him in a while- how’s he doing?”

And once again, Alex had no idea where to start.

*

Mum and Serena hadn’t spoken for nearly a week.  Whenever they were both in the house, each of them retreated to opposite corners of the house and expressed their frustration by slamming doors and playing music extra-loud.  It was at times like that that Alex missed Roxanne the most.  The house had seemed less cold and echoey before she’d gone to university.

This afternoon, however, Mum was out, so Serena came into the living room, flopped onto the sofa, and, without acknowledging Alex at all, grabbed the remotes and switched to MTV.  An All Saints video came on, followed by Blink 182, and Serena glowered at them both as if they were her mortal enemy.  

Serena’s hair was stringy, and there was always the faint smell of sweat under her perfume.  She looked as if she was falling to pieces.

Alex left it a while, then asked, “How was your day?”

Serena looked at him in surprised irritation.  “How do you think?”

“I… don’t know?”

Serena rolled her eyes.  “It was fucking fantastic, Alex.  Same as always.  Now let me listen to this.”  And she turned back to the TV.

And how was Alex supposed to respond to that?  Yell at her?  Hadn’t there been enough yelling around here lately?  Alex thought about Roxanne, who, as far as he could remember, hadn’t raised her voice to any of them in years.  If she wasn’t there, he needed to do his best to keep things to the standards she’d set.

He wouldn’t say anything.  He’d sit here in the living room, doing his homework, and wait.  If Serena decided she wanted to talk, whether that was in five minutes or two hours, he’d be there.  If not, then at least they wouldn’t be alone.

*

It was on the bulletin board in the Sixth Form building, and Alex saw it almost as soon as he got to school.  Through the crowds of people milling around looking for their friends and getting ready for their first lessons, he caught a glimpse and was sucked right in.

Self-improvement through meditation, Tuesday evenings.

Tuesday evenings.

Alex’s first thought after making a note of the address (St Andrew’s school for Boys, on the other side of town) was that he needed to find Melanie.  She’d never given him any hint that she was interested in meditation or that she was free on Tuesday evenings, but you never knew.

He found her in the corner, reading a battered old paperback whose title he couldn’t quite make out.  He manoeuvred his way through the crowd until they were fact-to-face.  She looked up and grinned, her top lip twitching oddly.  “Hi, Alex!”

“Hi, Melanie.  Did you see that flyer on the message board?”

“No?”

“Self-improvement through meditation.  It’s at St Andrew’s tomorrow.”  He gave her what he hoped was a winning smile.  “I’m thinking of checking it out- do you want to come with me?”

Melanie’s face lit up.

*

Marley had gone to the shops a few minutes ago, probably to get away from the screams in the hallway.  Serena had finally annoyed Mum into acknowledging her existence again.

“I could smell the cigarette smoke from all the way down the stairs!  How dare you?” 

Alex stared down at his coursework, rereading the same sentence he’d started reading when Mum had driven Serena’s friends out of the door.  It didn’t help him block it out.

“Disrespecting me, disrespecting this house…”

Serena gave a laugh that sounded like a gas explosion.  “Respecting this house?  What do you want me to do, salute the bricks?”

“This house, where I allow you to sleep…”

“You allow me?”

“Where would you be if I decided, sorry, you’re not sleeping under my roof anymore, find somewhere else?”

“Um… in touch with Social Services?”

Alex heard a sound.  It was muffled by the door, but he thought it might have been a slap.  Mum’s voice afterwards was a low growl.  “You are the most selfish, cruel, despicable person I have ever met…”

“Mm,” said Serena, “Says the woman who faked a suicide attempt just because she didn’t like her daughter’s A-level choices.”

Mum went silent.  Alex wasn’t surprised.  That had made him feel as though he’d been punched in the stomach, and he wasn’t even in the same room.

As Mum began to sob, Serena made her getaway.  Alex heard the door slam, and felt a little relieved.

He wondered if he should go out into the hallway and talk to Mum.  It might help, or it might just mean putting himself in the firing line.  Before he could decide one way or the other, though, Mum came into the living room.

Her eyes were red, but there was no hint of tears in her voice.  “Look at all this!”  She held her hands out to the middle of the room.  Marley had left a couple of crisp packets on the sofa.  “How can you stand to live in this filth?”

Alex put his book to one side.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t see…?”

“Don’t you care?” she demanded staring at him in shocked disgust.

“Well, like I said, I didn’t…”

“Some days, I think about turning you all out until you learn to act like human beings.”

Alex froze in the middle of standing up.  Suddenly it was hard to breathe.

“Some days I wonder how I managed to end up with you.”

Alex got his voice under control.  “Mum, I know you’re still upset about Serena…”

“I’m upset because my children all seem to think that they can go through life just being catered to!”  She looked over her shoulder, plucked up the crisp packets, and threw them at Alex’s chest.  They hit home and fluttered to the ground.  “Seventeen?  You act like a twelve-year-old!  I’m surprised you don’t still need someone to wipe your backside for you!”

Alex could gave turned around and left the room, but she’d just have followed him and come up with worse things to say by the second.  But if he shut his eyes and stayed still and silent, maybe she’d get fed up and leave.

*

St Andrew’s was just similar enough to their own school to be confusing- corridors that you expected to end in doors to the main hall ended up outside, and corridors you expected to take you outside just led to more corridors.  The gym was the same size as the one Alex and Melanie were used to, but the floor was more brown than yellow, with markings that were cracked and faded.  The air had that cold, dusty smell you always got in rooms that were suddenly empty.

The meeting started with trust exercises.  The idea was that one person would jump off the wooden bars, and the rest of the group would catch them and bear them down to the floor, like crowd surfing at a rock concert.  Melanie went first.  For a few seconds after she jumped off the bars, she looked like a bird flying through the air.

When it came to Alex’s turn, he was nervous.  He expected it to be awkward and uncomfortable- so many opportunities to land wrong and hurt yourself or someone else- but it wasn’t.  It felt almost like falling onto a mattress.

It wasn’t long afterwards that the guy in charge blew the whistle.  “Right!  Everybody shake yourselves out and come and sit down!”  He motioned towards a circle of chairs at the other end of the gym.  Once everyone had followed his instructions and settled down, he bounded into the middle. “I’m Shaun Pinder- Head Oakman!  Now, did everyone enjoy that?”

There was a happy rumbling sound from the circle.

“I said, did everyone enjoy that?”

This time, there was a ragged, self-conscious shout of, “Yes!”

“That’s better!  Now, do you know why I got you all to do it?”

Everyone shook their heads.  Even the ones who might have ordinarily taken a guess were far too worn out from the crowd surfing.

“I got you to do it because that’s how I think she world should be.”  His voice lowered to an awed whisper.  “Everybody supporting everybody else.  Knowing that there’s somebody there to catch you when you fall.  Or support you when you try to fly.”

Alex felt that echo in his head.  That’s how I think the world should be.  But whose fault was it if it wasn’t?

“People have been tricked into caring about money, or what’s on TV, or whether or not the bus is going to be late.  But that’s nothing.  The truth is, there is nothing more important, nothing more lasting, than your connections with other people.”

Alex’s eyes started to sting.  He tried to hold his face still, but he couldn’t.  That’s how the world should be.  Everything else is nothing.

Beside him, Melanie’s eyes widened in concern.  She put a hand on his back and whispered, “Alex, what’s wrong?”  But all he could do was shake his head.

*

The meeting went on for another hour, but Alex didn’t hear much of what was said.  All he could think about was people catching each other when they fell.

“Alright, guys,” said Shaun, “I’m going to call a short break.  Get yourselves a drink, go to the toilet, be back here in five minutes.  Go!”  He clapped his hands once, and people started getting up.

Alex turned straight to Melanie.  “I’m sorry about earlier.  For alarming you like that.”

Melanie shook her head.  “No.  No-o-o.  You don’t need to be sorry.  But what was…?”

“Heeey.” Came a voice from behind his shoulder.  He looked around and saw Shaun Pinder standing over him.  “Are you alright?”

So he’d noticed, too.  Alex swallowed and said, “Yes.  I’m sorry if I…”

“No!  Don’t apologise!  Sharing feelings is what tonight’s all about!”  And he flashed Alex a brilliant smile.  Alex still felt like crawling into a hole and never coming out, but he tried to smile back.

Shaun Pinder’s voice softened.  “Would I be right in thinking that you don’t have as many human connections as you’d like?”

Alex thought about Roxanne, hundreds of miles away, Dad, all the way across the ocean, and Marley, Serena and Mum, who made rooms feel empty even when they were in them.  “…Yes.”

“Well, that’s not necessarily a reflection on you.”  Pinder put a warm hand on his shoulder.  “You’re not stuck with the family you’re born into, or the friends you have at school.  And you’re not stuck with what they want to make you into, either.”

Alex smiled, genuinely this time.  “Well, that’s a comforting thought…”

“It’s the truth!” said Pinder.

Out of the corner of his eye, Alex could see Melanie frowning.  He wanted to ask what was wrong, but then Pinder was talking again.  “What did you say your name was?”

“Um, I didn’t.  Alex.”

“Well, listen, Alex, we’re going to be doing some hot-seating in the second half.  Does that sound like something you’d be up for?”

Alex laughed.  “Sure.”

“Brilliant.  I’ll reserve a slot for you.”  He turned round and blew on his whistle, calling everybody back to the circle.

Natalie shut Alex’s door and cleaned up downstairs, so that the others wouldn’t panic when they got home.  Then she sent them a text saying she might not be home til late, and she was off to the station.

The train took nearly an hour to get to Brighton, and Natalie spent the whole of that time staring at the back of the seat in front of her, listening to her pulse thumping in her ears.  She was going to get some answers.  She was going to see Alex again and she was going to make him tell her exactly what he was up to.

So… This doesn’t look like Amsterdam, she’d say.

Or, Boy, have you got some explaining to do.

Or maybe just, Alex!  Long time, no see!

The train pulled into Brighton Station.  Natalie’s stomach gave a lurch, and then she was on her feet and stepping out into the sunlight.

It was a twenty-minute walk to the hotel, all uphill.  Honestly, Natalie was quite glad about that.  She liked the momentum- it was easier to be sure of yourself when you were upright and moving forward.  It was easier to dismiss thoughts like, What if he’s already moved on to the next place?  What if he sees me coming and manages to sneak off?  What if I’ve just wasted my time?

If Alex had actually been in the hotel lobby, Natalie might very well have panicked and blown the whole thing.  But besides the staff, there were only three people hanging around the bar.  She’d have time to prepare herself.

“Can I help you?” asked one of the women on reception.

“I’m a friend of one of the guests,” said Natalie, trying not to sound so overexcited that she came across as a potential troublemaker, “I told him I’d wait for him in the bar- is that alright?”

The receptionist shrugged.  “I don’t see why not.”

Natalie smiled at her, then went up to the bar.  She’d get an Archer’s and lemonade.  A bit of liquid courage, that would be useful.

*

Isaac’s friend had photos of graffiti and notes she’d found, all saved on her phone, and she talked as she flicked through them, as if she was giving Isaac and Denny a slideshow.  “They turn up everywhere,” she said.  They were sitting at a table in the theatre café, drinking tea out of cardboard cups.  “I must have heard from fifteen or sixteen people since the first article went out.  There’s messages written in old textbooks, there’s stuff on the internet, there’s things scratched on the underside of tables and things…  It’s like a secret code, but it means whatever we like.”

Isaac had been up in the office with Denny all day- Jonathan said he shouldn’t be out front if Pinder was still around.  All day, Isaac had seemed like he was on the verge of mentioning something, but he never had.  Jonathan had told him not to ask Denny about anything to do with Pinder; Denny knew it.

Anyway, they’d been working together all day, and then, just before the end of work, Isaac got a text from his friend Rosalyn, saying she’d meet him in the café if he wanted to walk home together.  And just as Denny had been saying goodbye for the evening, Isaac had asked him to come down and meet her.

Denny still didn’t feel right.  Being down here made his eyes feel scratchy and his skin feel too warm.  His stomach was churning like a washing machine, and part of his mind was screaming at him to get out of here before he hurt someone again.  But…

“How do you think it got started?” he asked her, looking at the photo of the scratched-up table.  He wondered what they’d used to do it.  A penknife?  Maybe a scalpel?

Rosalyn’s eyes widened.  They were very blue.  “Well…  So, this is only based on what one guy said, OK?  But there was a student at Berrylands ten years ago, named Ben Sugar, and he said it was based on something they’d all seen written on a railway bridge somewhere near Croydon.  So that might be the original ‘Kelpie and Silkie’ message… or it might have been based on something else, even earlier.  Either way, it would be great if I could find it.”  She sounded like an archaeologist in a film, putting together a team of adventurers to search the jungle for a mysterious artefact.

“Would have been great if he’d been more specific,” said Isaac, with a twisty smile.

Rosalyn shrugged.  “Well, it was a long time ago.  Give him credit for remembering some stuff.”

Isaac made a noise of disagreement.

“Anyway, if he’d been more specific, I wouldn’t have anything to base those articles around, would I?”  Rosalyn smiled at Denny.  “As it is, a lot of it’s just me and Judith wandering around the woods.”

Denny smiled.  “Well, if you can make it entertaining…”

“He’s right, you know,” said Isaac, “People have written whole novels about being stuck in the woods with nothing to do.  At least you guys are actually looking for something.”

At that point, Denny looked up and spotted his sister.  She hadn’t done anything to draw attention to herself- she was just standing there, blending into the background.  Waiting.

Denny jumped to his feet.  “Tavia!  I’m sorry!”

She shrugged.  “For what?”

Isaac and Rosalyn were staring at him.  Denny’s throat went funny.  “For…  Well, you were going to meet me in the office, and…”

“Relax.  I saw you as soon as I came in.  I just didn’t want to interrupt, that’s all.”  She nodded at the others.  “Isaac, isn’t it?  And you’re…?”

“Rosalyn.”  She eyed Tavia warily, as if she was a strange animal that might be about to bite her.  “I’m one of Isaac’s housemates.”

“Octavia Lambton.  Pleased to meet you.”  She put out a hand, and Rosalyn warily shook it.  Denny could see why she was nervous.  Tavia must have been a foot taller than her, easily- she sometimes gave you the impression that her skeleton had been built with a few extra bones to everyone else’s.  When she was younger, she’d got some modelling work because of it.  “I’m sorry about all the trouble you’ve had.”

“Hm?  Oh, I wasn’t really the one who…”

“It’s fine,” said Isaac, a little abruptly, then caught himself.  “I mean, things should be OK now.  We’ve talked to the police.”  He sounded perfectly polite, but he was still giving Tavia an odd look.  Not like the one he’d given Denny after he jumped up.  More surprised.  Less concerned.  It was almost as if he wanted to protect him from her.

Denny struggled to make sense of it- if anything, it should have been the other way round, shouldn’t it?- but then he remembered jumping up and stammering out an apology when she’d come in.  They thought he was scared of her.  They thought she was the one who’d turned him into a nervous wreck.

It was almost funny.

He cast about for a way to put them at ease.  “Are you in a hurry to get home?” he asked her, “Because Rosalyn’s been showing me some messages she’s found around town, and I think you’d be interested.”

Tavia did a double-take- usually Denny was the one in a hurry to get home, and they both knew it- but she played along.  “I can spare a few minutes.  Do you two mind if I join you?” she asked Isaac and Rosalyn.

Isaac looked at Denny, to check everything was OK, then pulled out a seat for her.  “Sure.  Kelpie and Silkie could always do with a bigger audience.”

Tavia’s brow furrowed.  “Kelpie and…?”

“You’ll see,” said Denny, with a grin.

*

Natalie had been waiting in the bar area for twenty minutes when Alex turned up.  She saw him before he saw her.  He was walking through the front entrance, head down, shoulders hunched, and he looked as if he was going to go straight to the stairs.  Slowly, Natalie rose to her feet.  “Alex!” she called out.

His head snapped up, and his eyes went wide.

She met his gaze, and held out her hands in a pleading gesture.  “What the hell?” she added quietly.  Her voice sounded strangely wounded, almost disappointed.  She’d meant to say something a lot cleverer, but she felt she’d got her point across.

Alex stared at her for a few seconds, then, slowly, moved towards her.  He looked more like he was swimming underwater than walking.

“What happened to your eye?” he asked, as soon as he was close enough.

For a moment, Natalie wondered what he was talking about, but then she remembered being shoved face-first into the doorframe.  There must have been a bruise by now.  “Some woman keeps coming to the house, saying she’s your mother,” she told him, “In fact, Mariam sent you a text about her on Monday.  Why didn’t you reply?”

“My phone’s been in the hotel room safe this whole time.  I thought that if I…”  He broke off and shook his head.  “I don’t even know where to begin.  Can we sit down?”  He pointed to a table in the corner.  Natalie nodded.

He pulled her chair out for her before he sat down himself.  Natalie didn’t see the point of that- they were great big armchairs that towered over the little coffee table- but it seemed to be one of those things that Alex did without thinking.  “I know where we can begin,” said Natalie, “Why did you tell us you were going to Amsterdam if you weren’t?”

Alex made a slow, swallowing motion.  “I thought I was keeping you safe.  The four of you.  I…  How much do you know about the Oakmen?” he asked, his head snapping up again.

“Quite a bit, as of yesterday.”

Alex raised his eyebrows.

“Shaun Mandeville showed up at Mariam’s work and tried to convince her that I was a psychopath.”

“Why did he…?”

“Because we went to one of his meetings, and I made fun of his warm-up game.  Then Isaac ran outside to throw up, and we all followed him out.  It was an evening, alright.”

Alex looked at the floor, and sighed deeply.  “Well, that goes to show how wrong I was.  I thought that if I was out of the picture, he’d lose interest in the rest of you.”  He looked up at her.  “Natalie, I’m sorry.  I should have been honest with you from the start.”

“Well… why weren’t you?”

“I was worried that if I told you about the Oakmen, you’d want to do something about them.  I thought the safest thing was to lie low and wait for them to move on, and I didn’t think you’d want to do that.  Especially not you and Isaac.”

Natalie nodded.  “Still…”

“Still,” agreed Alex, “I should have trusted you.  I’m sorry.”  He took a deep breath, and put his fingers to his temples, clearly gearing up for something.  “When I lived with the Oakmen, Pinder… Shaun… would send us out at night to vandalise shops and government buildings.  We never hurt any actual people- I wouldn’t want you to think we were that far gone- but we caused a lot of property damage.”  Another deep breath.  “And sometimes we used small explosives to do it.”

Natalie swallowed.  “You’re talking about the bomb in the park.”

Alex nodded, his eyes big and sad.

Natalie didn’t even know why she was surprised.  She’d brought up the possibility herself, two days ago.  They’d all talked about it!  Why had the blood suddenly rushed to her head like that?  “But… they couldn’t have known we were going to be there.  It’s like Rosalyn said- if she hadn’t picked up that exact book in the library…”

“I think it was a coincidence,” said Alex, “They probably didn’t even know I was in the area until my name came up afterwards.”  His mouth twitched.  “Although it probably wasn’t a coincidence that they were in the area to begin with.  They’d have known that Denny had family there…”

Suddenly, the air around Natalie felt heavy.  She thought about the pressure at the bottom of the ocean, enough to crush a human in seconds.  “I’m glad you got me to sit down,” she mumbled.

Alex reached out and put his hand over hers.

Natalie took a few deep breaths, clearing her head a bit.  It must have been the day catching up with her.  “What about the woman who came to the house?  Do you think she really was your mother?”

“Definitely,” said Alex, without any hesitation, “And I don’t think she worked out where I was on her own, either.”

“You’re not really in touch with her, then?” said Natalie- stupidly, because why would Mrs Rudd have had to bully her way into her son’s house if they’d been in touch?  And why wouldn’t she have known that Alex was at Berrylands?

Alex shook his head.  “Not since I was seventeen.  I lost touch with them all after I joined up with the Oakmen.”  (Natalie noticed that his hand was still over hers.  She didn’t try to move it.)  “The only person I did get back in touch with was my sister Roxanne, and that only happened when I turned up on her doorstep out of the blue four years later.”

“Was that when you left the Oakmen?”

Alex smiled.  “Mm-hm.  Showed up with nothing but the clothes on my back.  I’d had to ask some passers-by for enough money to get a train ticket.”

 Natalie took a shaky breath.  There was a decision ticking over in her head.  In a few seconds, she’d have made it.  “And that’s what you had to do to get away?”

Alex nodded.  Not smiling anymore, but still holding her hands.

She thought of Alex having to sneak away from everyone he knew, people he’d lived with since he was seventeen.  Probably (given what Natalie had seen of his mother) the first people he’d ever lived with who didn’t scream and threaten at the slightest excuse.  She thought of him leaving behind everything he owned because he didn’t want them to suspect he wasn’t coming back.  She thought of him begging hostile strangers for money, all so he could travel far enough to take a chance on a sister he hadn’t seen in years.  Natalie had thought her journey this afternoon had been tense, but what had actually been at stake?  Even if she hadn’t seen Alex, or if she’d seen him and he’d refused to speak to her, she’d still have had somewhere to go back to and sleep that night.  What had gone through Alex’s head when he’d been on that train?  And how long had it taken him to find his sister’s place afterwards, and then to confirm that she still lived there and was willing to take him in?  There must have been a million horrible possibilities going through his mind every second.

Natalie made up her mind.  “Well, OK.  I think I understand why you went to so much effort to get away from them this time.” 

Alex let go and sat back, sighing deeply.  “I still shouldn’t have put you all in that position.  There I was, thinking I was protecting you, and I just made it worse.”

“Why not give us a chance to protect you instead?”

Alex’s mouth opened a little wider, then twitched back into position.  “You want me to come back to London with you?”

“Yeah.”  Natalie tried not to blink.  If she maintained eye contact, then he couldn’t wriggle out of it.  “We’ll all be safer if we’re all in the same place.”

Alex’s mouth curved up into a fond smile.  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to put all your eggs in one basket?”

“Nope.  She buys them in packs of six.  It’s cheaper.”

That had been a bit of a gamble, but it paid off- Alex laughed.  “I meant, if we’re all in the same place, and the Oakmen know where to find us…”

“Well, at the moment, they know where to find everyone but you,” Natalie pointed out.  A bit of a guilt trip, true, but definitely worth it if it worked.

Looking down at the table, Alex let out a long, wavering breath.  Finally, he nodded.  “If you’ll have me back… then yes.”

June 1997

For the third time since they’d started driving, Alex opened up the tape deck and put in Hard Day’s Night.  He heard a faint groan from the back of the car (it might have been Serena’s favourite, but it wasn’t Roxanne’s and it definitely wasn’t Marley’s), but it was a more good-natured groan than it would have been an hour ago.  They were closing in on Chester.  Soon the journey would be done.

Alex was in the passenger seat, with the printed-out directions in his lap.  It was his job to tell Mum which junctions to look out for next.  “You’re the official navigator,” she’d told him with a laugh, and it was funny how happy that made him.  They had to take Exit 15, then Exit 12.  After that, it all turned into street names.  The end of the motorway was almost in sight.

“Alex?” asked Serena.

“Hm?”

“Would you rather be hanged or beheaded?”

Alex laughed.  He knew, without even turning around, that she’d got her nose into one of those Horrible Histories books again.

“I’d rather escape and not die,” said Marley.

“Yeah, but if you had to.”

“I don’t know, Serena,” said Alex, “What would you choose?”

Serena answered immediately- she’d been thinking about this.  “I’d rather be beheaded.  It’s quicker.  As long as they use an axe instead of a sword.”

Their mother, who’d been doing a good impression of somebody who hadn’t heard any of this, made a little excited noise and turned to Roxanne.  She was in the back with the two younger ones, presumably so that she could calm them down when they got restless.  “Roxy, I just thought- if you end up taking Economics, you can talk to your Uncle Jack about getting a Saturday job!  He was just telling me the other day, they’re always looking for people.”

Roxanne fidgeted with her hair.  It was thick and golden-brown, and she never tied it up, which meant that you almost didn’t recognise her when you could see her ears or shoulders.  “Mum, I already said…”

“You’d be learning things that’ll help you on your course, and you’d have a bit of spending money!”

Alex looked up at the sign ahead, then down at the print-out.  “Mum, Exit 15 is…”

“Think about it, Roxy,” said Mum.

“Mum, I’m not taking Economics!  I’m not even predicted an A in Maths!”

“You would be if you tried.”

Alex looked up again.  “Mum, Exit 15 is right ahead.”

“Oops!” Mum laughed, “Almost missed it!”  And she wrenched the car sharply to the left.

*

Dad had been on a business trip for the last week, and he and Mum had arranged for them all to come up and meet him so they could spend the last few days together.  “Better than going home on the train,” Dad had said.  They’d be staying at the Plaza Hotel.  Supposedly, that was one of the expensive ones. 

When they finally arrived, they thought they’d come to the wrong place.  It was a dull brick building, a little like an office block, on the corner next to a flyover.  But when they got inside and saw the gold-and-white walls and the chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, their minds were put at rest.  It was like being on the inside of a champagne glass.

“We’re with Sidney Rudd,” Mum told the black-clad woman on reception, “Can you call and tell him we’re here?”

The woman nodded.  She was all in black- her suit, her hair, even the thick frames on her glasses.  The other receptionists were the same.  Alex could imagine the Grim Reaper dressing a little like them.  The woman picked up the phone, spoke quietly, then nodded and smiled.  “He’s coming down,” she told Mum, “Have a seat.”

They sat down on a set of red velvet seats.  They looked so pristine that Alex felt the need to brush down his jeans before he sat down, in case he was the one who gave it its first smudge.

“Marley, please stop singing,” said Roxanne.  Ever since they’d left the car, Marley had kept up a constant chant of, Where did you come from, where did you go, where did you come from, cutting off my toes.  They were the only words he knew.  Alex suspected that he was getting revenge on Serena for making him listen to so much of the Beatles.

“Marley,” said Mum, a little more severely, and he stopped.  Marley would be twelve next month, and Mum had been making some pointed comments lately about acting his age.

One of the doors off to the side of the room swung open, and Dad came through.  “Look who it is!” he cried cheerfully, “You made good time!”

He went up to Mum first, and gave her a kiss on the cheek.  Then he ruffled Marley and Serena’s hair, just to annoy them.  There were a couple of grumbles and outraged whines of, “Dad!”, and then he moved on to the older kids.

“Alex, I swear only you would look that perky after spending hours in the car,” he said, clapping his hands on Alex’s shoulders.

“Well, he was the navigator,” said Mum, “I couldn’t have got here without him.”

“I doubt that,” said Alex, but her was pleased to hear her say so.

“Right!” said Dad, “How does everybody feel about dinner at Pizza Hut?”

Marley and Serena instantly brightened up.

Mum sighed.  “Just tell me it isn’t far.”

“Right across the road, honest.  We’ll be there in two minutes flat.”

“Good.  Because we’ve got unpacking to do first, remember.”

As if on cue, Roxanne bent down to pick up the suitcases.  Alex put out a hand, and she passed one of them to him.

*

They’d finished the garlic bread, and they were waiting for their main course.  Serena and Marley were colouring in a puzzle page with “The Hut Mutts” printed at the top.  There wasn’t a Pizza Hut where they lived, so this was a nice treat for them.

“I don’t think you’ve thought about the job opportunities,” Mum told Roxanne, “An Economics degree could get you all kinds of…”

“Give it a rest, Julie,” muttered Dad.

“But she could…”

“Let her finish her GCSEs before she starts wondering what degree to take.  OK?”

Serena twirled her crayon in her fingers as she eyed the picture she’d been working on.  “I think the worst form of execution would be being burned at the stake,” she told Alex, “And the second worst would be being boiled alive in hot oil, like Henry the Eighth did to all those monks.”

Alex nodded.  That didn’t surprise him.  A few Christmases ago, Serena had burned her arm quite badly after catching her sleeve on a candle, and she’d been terrified of fire for months afterwards.  Not that that was the only possible reason for somebody to be afraid of burning at the stake, of course, but it would certainly influence your opinion.

Mum cleared her throat.  “Your dad and I want to go to the hotel bar for a bit this evening.  Will you be alright in the room on your own?”

“101 Dalmatians is on,” Dad added, “The new one, I mean.”

Roxanne looked at Alex and the younger two.  “Yeah, that’ll be OK.”

“Good.”  Dad laughed.  “You keep your eye on them, Roxanne.”

Mum suddenly grimaced.  “Just as long as they don’t…”

“Oh, that’s not on ‘til later.”

To nobody’s surprise, Marley and Serena looked up, intrigued.  Discussing it in front of them hadn’t been one of Mum and Dad’s wiser moments.  Alex didn’t know what it was that they didn’t want them to watch, but he did know that he and Roxanne were going to have to keep a close eye on the TV remotes later.  Young kids could move pretty fast.

*

“I wish dogs lived forever,” said Marley as the ending credits rolled.

Alex nodded.  Their dog, Ace, was thirteen years old.  They’d got him the year before Marley was born.  These days, every time they dropped him off at the kennels, they worried that they wouldn’t see him again.

Serena was on her stomach on one of the beds, drawing something in her big refill pad.  Alex looked over, and saw that it was a scene from the movie- a group of raccoons and other wild animals breaking into the villains’ truck and using it to chase them.  “That’s really good, Serena.”

She grinned.  “It’s OK.  I wish I could make it look more realistic.”  Of the four of them, Serena was the odd one out, in terms of looks, anyway.  While the rest of them had dark hair and stocky builds, Serena was tiny, freckled and blonde.  Well, you know how Mum had that affair with that pixie? Roxanne had said once, with a rare grin.

“King of the Hill’s on next,” said Roxanne, nodding towards the TV screen, “What do you think?”

Alex thought about it.  “Should be OK.  It’s a cartoon- it can’t be that bad.”

“I can tell you’ve never seen Fritz the Cat.”

Alex, who was pretty sure Roxanne hadn’t seen it either, smiled.  “It’ll be fine.  There won’t be anything a ten-year-old can’t handle.”  He patted Serena’s shoulder.  “Especially a bloodthirsty ten-year-old like this one.”

*

The next morning, they toured the shops and the market stalls.  Alex, who had some money from his Saturday job and was in a generous mood, bought a cowboy hat for Marley, the new issue of Quiz Kids for Serena, and a bag of iced donuts for all three of them.

“They never look as nice in real life as they do on The Simpsons,” grumbled Marley as he examined the one in his hand.

“It’s not what they look like, Marley- it’s how they taste.”  Alex took another donut out of the bag for himself.  “And I think we can both agree that fictional donuts don’t taste of anything.”

Marley shrugged his agreement and polished it off, licking the icing off his fingers as he finished.

Occasionally, Mum and Roxanne’s voices drifted over to them from a few yards back.  They sounded like they were arguing about something.  “Serena,” said Alex, “I forgot to tell you before- there’s a Roman wall somewhere in Chester.”

“Really?”

“Mm.  I bet if we asked around, we could find it.”

“You know, the Romans were great, but I’d have definitely been on the Ancient Britons’ side,” said Serena, looking around for any signs that might point the way to the wall, “For one thing, their women had more rights.  And for another thing, they had druids.”

Alex fished the map out of his pocket so he could check to see whether the wall was nearby.  “Well, there you go.  I’ve got to admit, the druids were interesting people.”

“And they got to live underground, in mounds.”

“I’m pretty sure they only got buried in mounds after they died.”

“No, they lived underground.  It was great.”

Alex chuckled.  “The Roman wall’s about half a mile that way,” he told her, “Let’s go.”

*

Back at the hotel, they ordered room service, and room service turned out to include enormous slices of cheesecake with black cherries on top.  “We’re living like kings, here,” declared Marley.

“Couldn’t agree more,” said Alex.  The three of them were sat in a rough triangle around the table they’d put their plates on- Alex sitting on his bed, Marley on the desk chair, and Serena on the floor, more interested in her refill pad than in the food.

“If I was going to write a great novel,” she asked her brothers, “what should it be about?”

“Ancient Romans and their many methods of killing people,” said Alex.

“A guy who invents a pill that makes you glow in the dark,” countered Marley.

Serena nodded, taking both ideas into account.

Mum’s voice had, up to now, been a series of frustrated grunts muffled by the adjoining wall, but now she raised her voice loud enough for them to hear individual words.  “Your school’s offering a first-class Economics course, one that could get you into any university in the country, but no!  You read a picture book about vets when you were three, and that’s all you want to do!”

“You know you can get into university with a Biology A-level too, right?”

“Fine.  You know what?  Fine.  Ignore me!  Reject all my suggestions out of hand!”

“Look, Mum…”

“No!  I’m not even here, am I?  I don’t matter!”

Alex heard those last few words a lot clearer, because the door swung open for Roxanne to storm out.  Before it slammed shut behind her, Alex heard the beginnings of a sob.

Alex thought about saying something to his sister, then decided against it.  Instead, he just moved aside so that she could get to her share of the food.

*

Their dad was due to meet them upstairs as soon as he finished work, so everyone made sure to get showered and changed for dinner before it got too late in the evening.  By five-thirty, there wasn’t really anything to do but sit around and wait for him to arrive.

Roxanne, who’d calmed down a bit from earlier, was listening to Serena talk about the epic novel that she was going to dedicate the next ten years of her life to writing.  “Authors don’t make much money, though,” said Roxanne, “You’d have to get another job as well.”

“Nope,” said Serena, still writing in her pad.

“You’ll be a starving artist.”

“Yep.  Suffering feeds my art.”

Roxanne burst out laughing.

Alex heard the sound of keys in the door, and was on his feet before their father even got into the room.  “How was work?” he asked, sounding annoyingly chirpy even to his own ears.

Dad chuckled.  “Don’t ask.  Let’s just say I’ve never been more ready for a good meal.”  He looked around the room.  “Where’s your mother?”

 “She’s still in the shower,” said Marley, nodding towards the bathroom, and Alex went cold.

He hadn’t seen Mum since they’d got back to the hotel.  First she’d been in her and Dad’s room, arguing with Roxanne,  and then she’d stayed in there, waiting for an apology that was never going to come, until everybody else had finished in the bathroom and she’d gone in there herself, locking the door behind her.  How long ago had that been?  He wanted to believe that it had only been half an hour, maybe forty minutes at most, but the more he thought about it, the surer he was that it had been closer to an hour.

“Well, I’m going to need one before we go out,” said Dad.  He went up to the bathroom door and gently knocked.  “Julie?”

There was no answer.  Alex could hear the water flowing in there, but nothing else.  Wouldn’t it have gone cold by now?  How long was Mum going to put up with that?

Dad knocked a little harder.  “Julie?”

Roxanne’s head shot up.  From the look on her face, wide-eyed and sickly, she’d thought the same thing.

Dad turned to Alex.  “How long’s she been in there?”

“I don’t know.”  His mouth had gone dry.  It was getting harder and harder to breathe properly.

He didn’t need to say anything else.  Dad knew everything, just by looking at his face.  He knocked one last time.  “Julie?  I’m coming in!”

Alex watched him fiddle with the lock, and knew it wouldn’t work.  He knew, before it happened, that Dad would have to ram the door with his shoulder, breaking the lock after a few tries, but probably not before he hurt himself as well.  And he knew what they’d see once the door was open.  He knew the shower would still be running.  He knew there’d be blood on the walls.

He knew, minutes before it all happened, that none of them would ever be the same again.

(From the StarrComix forum)

Kool-Ade                                                                      Saturday 11^th of March 2006

14:00 GMT

I’ve decided that what I really need is a warning label, like you get on cigarette packs.  Maybe then people would stop trying to mess with me and winning themselves a free trip to A&E.

Tom Dockin                                Saturday 11^th March 2006                                                                                                                                                                            14:02 GMT

Lol, yeah.  People like that are why McDonalds has to put “Warning- Boiling Water Is Hot” on their coffee cups.

HungryHungryHippo           Sunday 12^th March 2006

08:00 GMT

Nah, why bother to warn them?  Let them find out first-hand what happens when a sheep instigates a wolf.

Tom Dockin   Sunday 12^th March 2006

08:03 GMT

LOL, walking Darwin Awards.

*

(Excerpt from “Letting Shakespeare lead the way- an interview with Josette Lambton”, Mail on Sunday, 12^th March 2006)

At seventy years old, Josette Lambton is still chic as ever in a pink Armani suit topped off with a white hat.  “At my last party, I personally designed the outfits for each guest,” she tells me, “You can’t leave such things to chance.”  Lambton, who describes herself as “a great believer in the great British thank-you note,” considers it her duty to instil a sense of decorum and chivalry in the younger set.

Once the belle of London society, Josette Lambton now prefers to hold court in her Sussex estate, a quaint, beautifully maintained old house in the Elizabethan style.  “My son keeps trying to persuade me to move back to London,” she laughs, “Over my dead body!”

Later on, however, there is an unguarded moment in which Josette admits to me that her life here has its fair share of loneliness.  “One is often neglected and left to a cold world that keeps managing to her colder and more aloof and petty.”   Ask her how she feels about her daughter Octavia, and her face falls into a scowl.  “I don’t speak to her.  I don’t want to hear from her.  She has no gratitude for anything I or the rest of the family have done for her.  She has no job, no talent, and no morals.  All she knows how to do is leech off other people.”

Her relationship with son Jonathan, curator of the theatre founded by his late father, is far more congenial…

*

Written on the underside of a table in the Railway Café, Sutton:

Every country needs a healthy distrust of its elected officials- Kelpie and Silkie

Written on page 35 of Medieval Lifestyle, a textbook given out to Year Seven History classes at New Malden High School:

Ego non tu Latinum scio- Kelpie and Silkie.

Written on a discarded order form in Argos, Wimbledon Broadway:

DANCE FOR ME, CLOWN! – Kelpie and Silkie

*

(From the StarrComix forum)

KoolAde                                                  Friday 17^th March 2006                                                                                                                                                                            15:33 GMT

Tom Dockin:  What many don’t realise is, people are fucking insane as a baseline.  Put anyone in the wild, and they become an animal.

Lol yeah- and some of those animals are fucking PARASITES.  Can’t imagine half the losers at work surviving without their parents paying the rent.

Tom Dockin  Friday 17th March 2006

15:35 GMT

Haha.  Big surprise for them if they ever came up against something they couldn’t use Daddy’s credit card against.

Shaun wasn’t worried when the police showed up at his door.  These things happened sometimes.  Plan for every contingency, that was his motto.

Jo called him to the front door, and he greeted them with a smile.  “Good morning, officers.  How can I help you?”

“Are you Shaun Mandeville?” asked one of the coppers.  He was a stocky, shaven-headed type who looked as if he might have a bunch of lumpy blue tattoos under his uniform.  The type who believed in the rule of law, which usually meant throwing suspects down the stairs two or three times a week.  That might have scared some people, but not Shaun.  Guys like him were basically attack dogs- they’d follow whoever had the loudest voice.  All you had to do was redirect him to another target.

“Yes,” said Shaun, “May I ask what this is regarding?”  It was hard for him to get a read on the other officer.  He had more hair than the attack dog, and a thinner face.  He looked more like a deliveryman than real police.  Shaun would have to look a little closer at this one.

“We just want to ask a few questions,” said the attack dog, “Can we come in?”

“Of course,” said Shaun, “Right this way.”  He led them past Jo, who closed the door behind them.  If he led them to the conservatory at the back of the house, then that would give him an excuse to give them a tour of the house, maybe fill them in on the Oakmen’s good works so that they’d be more sympathetically inclined by the time the interview began.  The house itself was a little place they were renting from somebody’s relatives, but it made a nice backdrop.  No-one questioned your respectability when you were surrounded by mahogany tiles and tasteful beige carpets.

“Excuse the mess,” he said, nodding towards the baked-bean cans piled up on the living room table, “You caught us in the middle of our food drive.”

“Is that so?” asked the deliveryman, taking care not to sound interested.

Shaun shot him a winning smile.  “Help for the homeless.  We can’t do much, but I think it’s important to give back, don’t you?”

The deliveryman didn’t reply.

They passed through the kitchen, where Debbie was teaching Wade and Maya’s kids how to make fajitas, and down the back hall, where Jo’s Medieval-style tapestry hung, and finally into the conservatory, where they kept their musical instruments.  When Shaun pointed these things out, he was careful to address the attack dog rather than the deliveryman- guys like him always had a sentimental streak a mile wide.

“Take a seat,” he said, moving a set of bongos off the sofa so they could sit down.  He sat on the chair opposite, and leaned forward, trying to look as engaging as possible.  “So!  How can I help you?”

The attack dog cleared his throat.  “Well, there’s been some complaints.  Do you know a girl named Mariam Gharib?  University student?”

In a split-second, Shaun had to think the whole thing through and decide how he was going to play this.  Did he deny that he’d ever met Mariam, and hope that her co-workers hated her too much to ever mention that they’d seen him too?  Did he talk about her affectionately, and try to play it all off as a misunderstanding?  Did he do his best to convince the cops that everything she’d said was born out of a delusional obsession, a desire to feel important?  The trouble was, he had no idea what she was actually saying about him, although the fact that they were having this conversation in his house rather than at the police station suggested that it couldn’t be anything too dire.

He decided to go for the charm offensive.  “Mariam?  Yes, she came to a couple of our meetings.  Seemed like a very bright girl.”

“Well, she says you bothered her at work.”

“I wanted to check that she was OK.  She’d seemed upset at the meeting the day before.”  He hoped he’d phrased that right.  The last thing he wanted was to give the coppers the idea that the meeting had made her upset.

There was also the Natalie situation to deal with.  The cops would probably bring that up next.  Shaun needed to play himself as a concerned friend, trying to get Mariam out of a toxic friendship that was hurting her in ways she couldn’t see… but if he was giving the cops the idea that he didn’t know Mariam very well, then how could he have known about that?  The signs would have had to be particularly obvious, Shaun decided- stolen money, screeching fits in public, threats of suicide.  And the Oakmen were all about helping people, so Shaun would have had to…

“Do you know a man named Alex Rudd?” asked the deliveryman.

Shaun was temporarily thrown off-balance.  “Um…  I think I recognise the name.”  He nodded, righting himself.  “Yes, he was a guy who stayed with us for a few weeks.  This would have been five, six years ago.”  Jo and the others had practically pissed themselves in delight when Alex’s name came up after the bombing, but there had been no sign of him since this whole thing had started.  Even when all his housemates had come to the meeting, Alex was nowhere to be seen.  Hiding, or secretly pulling the strings?  Shaun wished he had a clue.  “We had to ask him to leave in the end.  He seemed… well… a little unhinged.”

If Alex had told the police anything about what had happened in Dorset, then he was an idiot.  The only evidence of any of their little adventures would have been things he and the rest of his team had left.  He’d only be incriminating himself.

“Well, Alex Rudd lives in the same house as Mariam Gharib,” said the deliveryman, triumphantly, as if he’d just pinned Shaun to the wall with a brilliant piece of evidence.

Shaun just winced in sympathy.  “Really?  God.  Poor Mariam.”

He’d surprised them there, he could tell.  The two of them went quiet for a moment, then looked at each other, like, Help, what do we do now?

Eventually, the attack dog cleared his throat.  “Mariam said that she heard someone trying to get into her house last Friday night.  One of her neighbours said he spotted a group of people in black outside her house.  You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

Shaun was going to kill Bradley.  He’d told him over and over, they had to go about this subtly if they were going to draw Alex out, but when Mariam didn’t show up to that first meeting, guess who decided that getting a posse together and trying to smash the door down was the best idea?  Ridiculous.  “…No?” he said, “Was everyone OK?”

Before the attack dog could reply, the deliveryman let out a long, nasal sigh.  “Look, the point is, Mariam and her housemates have made it clear that they don’t want you around.  You might not think that’s fair, you might not know why, but you need to take them at their word.  Don’t seek them out, don’t go to places you know they’ll be…  Just maintain a healthy distance.  OK?”

Shaun did his best to put on a sad, hangdog expression.  “Well, I’m sad to hear it, but if that’s what they want, I’ll honour their wishes.”  He remembered Mariam’s co-worker, the guy behind the bar.  Adrian, she’d called him.  He hadn’t seemed to like her much, had he?  That might be a good place to start.

“And I’d stay away from Berrylands University in general,” the attack dog broke in, “We checked with the university staff, and they never gave you official permission to be there.  Don’t make trouble for yourself, eh?”

Shaun felt like poking the attack dog’s eyes out with his thumbs.  “You’re right.  I’ll be sure to keep my distance.”

He just needed a way to get in touch with Adrian.  Then he could decide what to do next.

*

Mariam had told her over and over about what had happened on Monday, but, even so when Natalie opened the door to a strange woman with long grey hair, it didn’t ring a bell.  Her mother had often told her that she needed to be a better listener.

“I’m here to see Alex,” the woman said, and then Natalie remembered.

“I don’t know what to tell you.  He’s not here.”

The woman’s expression didn’t change.  “Let me in, please.”

 “Nope.”  Natalie folded her arms.

Mrs Rudd (if that was really who she was) took a harsh, ragged breath.  “I really think you’ll want to let me in this time,” she said, nodding towards her right hand.

Natalie looked down.  Mrs Rudd’s hand was mostly hidden in her handbag, but there was something in there.  Something grey, possibly tube-shaped.  It looked as if she was holding it in the way someone would hold a gun.

Natalie’s first thought was, That’s almost certainly fake.

Almost, though.  Could Natalie take that risk?  Because even if Mrs Rudd didn’t exactly strike her as a master gangster, even if Natalie had no idea how she’d even begin to get hold of a real gun, there was always that small chance that she was and she had.  And if it was real, then from what Mariam had said, Mrs Rudd seemed like exactly the sort of person who’d lose her temper and pull the trigger at the slightest provocation.

Trying her very best not to sound threatening, Natalie asked, “What do you want?”
Mrs Rudd’s mouth gaped in exasperation.  “I just told you…”

“No, I know you want to come in,” Natalie said quickly, “But what do you want to do once you have?  Alex isn’t in.  He told us he was going to Amsterdam.  If he’s not there, we don’t know where he is.”  And then she accuses me of lying and shoots me in the stomach.

But instead, Mrs Rudd stayed calm.  “I want to see his room.  Maybe he left something in there that can tell us something.”

Alright.  She had a plan, and that plan wasn’t ‘run amok through the house destroying everyone’s possessions.’  That was better than Natalie had expected.  She stood aside and let her through.  “I should warn you, I don’t actually have a key for Alex’s room.”

 Mrs Rudd didn’t seem to hear her.  She was looking at a couple of opened and discarded envelopes that had fallen on the floor.  She nudged them with her foot.  “This what you do, then?  Leave your rubbish all over the carpet?”

Natalie caught a glimpse of Isaac’s name on one of the envelopes, and silently cursed him.  “I’m sure it was just…”

“If it was my house, I’d make you eat it.  Who do you think’s paying for this place? The fucking tooth fairy?”

Natalie was pretty sure there wasn’t any answer to that question that wouldn’t infuriate her even more.  “Alex’s room is just upstairs,” she said, pointing at the staircase.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”  Mrs Rudd took Natalie’s arm and all but dragged her up.

Her hand wasn’t in the handbag anymore.  Assuming it was a real gun, how quickly could Mrs Rudd get hold of it if Natalie tried something funny?  And how much damage could it do if it went off unexpectedly?

They arrived at Alex’s door, just across the hall from Natalie’s.  Mrs Rudd looked at her expectantly.  “Well?” she asked, after a few seconds had gone by.

“I told you.  I don’t have a key for his room.”

Mrs Rudd exploded.  “Use your own key!  Your own key!  They’re all the same in places like this!”

Obediently, Natalie took her own key out of her pocket.  She knew it wasn’t going to work, but she tried it anyway.  And she kept her eyes focused on the key and the lock, because she knew if she looked around and saw Mrs Rudd’s hand disappear into her handbag again she might actually lose her mind.

After a few tries, Natalie heard an angry, snorting groan from behind her.  “For fuck’s sake!  Move!”  And she elbowed Natalie aside so that she could try rattling the key in the lock herself.

The bag was still under her arm, squeezed between her ribcage and her elbow.  There was no chance for Natalie to snatch it.

Eventually, Mrs Rudd let out another groan, and turned around, leaving Natalie’s key stuck in the lock.  “There’ll be a spare key downstairs.  Move.”

Natalie followed her back down the stairs.  “I don’t think we’ve got…”
Mrs Rudd whirled around to face her.  “How about you stop talking and listen for a change?  Hmm?”  Then she turned back round and headed for the kitchen.

Natalie didn’t know why she thought the hypothetical spare key was going to be in one of the food cupboards, but apparently she did.  Mrs Rudd ransacked them, opening them wide and throwing all the cans and packets she found onto the floor behind her.  “Look at this!” she snapped, waving a multi-pack of Haribo Starmix in Natalie’s face, “Are you honestly going to tell me this is how a mature person lives his life?”

“That’s not Alex’s,” said Natalie.  Isaac had bought it from Tesco yesterday, so that they could share.

“I should just accept the fact that he’s never going to grow up, shouldn’t I?”  She threw the Haribo packets down.  “I mean, I get a letter from Berrylands University telling me he’s getting expelled for drugs.  First I heard of it!  First I heard that he was even at Berrylands University!”

Natalie couldn’t talk for a moment.  “Expelled for drugs.”  So that’s why he vanished into thin air.  That’s why he started writing weird messages on the wall.  That’s why…

Wait.

Alex was twenty-three.  Why would the university write to his mother, even if he was getting expelled?  All of Natalie’s post had been addressed to her, not her parents.  Even the Conditional Offers, and she’d still been seventeen when some of those had come through.  Wasn’t that how universities worked?

Who do you think’s paying for this, the fucking tooth fairy?

First I heard that he was even at Berrylands University!

If she hadn’t known he was at Berrylands, then she couldn’t have been paying his tuition.  And it couldn’t have just been a case of her sneakily reading his letters after he’d given her house as an alternative postal address, or she’d have read other letters from the university before.  “Where did you think he was?” asked Natalie.

“I had no idea!  He threw me away as soon as he didn’t need me anymore!”  Her face hardened into a tight scowl.  “That’s what your generation does, right?  Everything’s disposable.”

Natalie mumbled something noncommittal.

Mrs Rudd fidgeted with the cupboards for a few more seconds, then suddenly turned back to Natalie, her face lighting up with inspiration.  “You know, even if we can’t find a spare key, I bet we could break the door down.  The two of us together.”

Right.  Because I’m on your side all of a sudden.  “I… really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
 Mrs Rudd reached out and grabbed Natalie’s arm just below her bicep, digging her fingers in like one little kid trying to intimidate another.  “We’re doing it.  Come on.”
They went back upstairs, Mrs Rudd talking all the while.  “He’s barely matured since he was seven years old.  They only thing he’s leaned is how to manipulate people better.  He’s manipulated you into being a human shield for him, if you’d just wake up and see it.”

Natalie said nothing.  She was thinking about something else.   If the university didn’t send her the letter, who did?

Actually, how sure am I that there even was a letter?  Maybe she imagined it.  Maybe she just needed an excuse to barge into her son’s house with a fake gun.

Probably fake.

They reached Alex’s door again.  “Right,” said Mrs Rudd, “We kick that spot at the exact same time.”  She pointed to a spot just to the left of the doorknob.  “The exact same time, understand?”

Natalie mumbled something.

“Right.”  Mrs Rudd took a step back, and pulled Natalie with her.  “Three…  Two…  One!”

It didn’t work.  Natalie’s foot hit the door a second or two before Mrs Rudd’s, and before she could put her foot down, Mrs Rudd stumbled and barged into her side, knocking Natalie against the wall.  She braced her arms against it and straightened herself up.  If I’d hit my head and been knocked out just then, she’d have had no-one left to threaten.  Maybe she’d have got bored and left.

They gave it another try.  There was less stumbling this time, but that was pretty much the only improvement.  They were about three seconds apart this time, and the door creaked a bit but didn’t budge.  Mrs Rudd rounded on Natalie.  “You might as well not even be here!”

Natalie had no idea what to say to that.  I might as well not even be part of this home invasion.  People expect more co-operation in these things.

“This might seem like a silly game to you, nut it’s real life to me!”  Mrs Rudd shoved her.  “Would you treat your own mother like this?  Are you that heartless?”  She gave her another shove.  “Answer me!”  She shoved again, and Natalie’s head hit the doorframe.

Her first instinct was to grab her head and curse until the pain faded.  Instead of doing that, she shut her eyes and let herself drop to the floor.

It was impulsive and it was a serious gamble, but now that Natalie had done it she had no choice but to see it through to the end.  She lay perfectly still as Mrs Rudd snapped at her to get up.  She lay perfectly still as Mrs Rudd crouched down and shook her.  She even stayed perfectly still as Mrs Rudd slapped her cheeks to try and shock her awake.  She’d made this stupid decision, and now she had to tough it out and turn it into a smart one.

Natalie heard the floorboards creak as Mrs Rudd got to her feet, and then a scared whimper of, “Oh God, oh God…”

Scared, not angry, she told herself, That’s a good sign.

Yeah, until she decides to burn the house down around you to get rid of the evidence.  Or to shoot you in the head and make it look like a burglary gone wrong.

Natalie stayed still, and she listened.

Mrs Rudd stayed there for a few minutes of short, whiny breaths.  After that, Natalie heard retreating footsteps across the hallway and down the stairs.

Natalie didn’t dare open her eyes until a full minute after she heard the door slam.  That was how long it took to be sure that Mrs Rudd was definitely gone and this wasn’t some kind of trick- Natalie could see her slamming the door and hiding in the house, but she couldn’t see her staying quiet this long.  It was safe.  The coast was clear.

Natalie sat up slowly, in case it turned out she really did have concussion.  When she was upright and her head didn’t feel like it was swimming, she got to her feet.

Her phone was in her room.  She’d call the police first, then try and get hold of the others.  They would not be happy when they saw the state of the kitchen.  Natalie could only hope that…

Something was wrong.  Natalie knew it was soon as she stood up.  There was a ray of light coming from behind her that hadn’t been there before.

Natalie turned around, and saw Alex’s door hanging open.  That last thump must have done the trick.  Mrs Rudd must have been panicking too much to notice.

There was enough of a gap for her to see inside.  Enough to see that Alex wasn’t still in there, slumped on the bed or hanging from the ceiling.  She hadn’t even known that she’d been worried about that until right this moment, but the relief was so sharp it was almost painful.

Part of her wanted to turn around and respect Alex’s privacy, but a lower, nastier part said, Well, Alex should have thought about that before running off, shouldn’t he?

Alex’s room had the same bed, wardrobe and desk as all the others in the house, and he hadn’t brought in any extra furniture, so it wouldn’t be too hard to search.  Natalie opened the wardrobe (you pressed the door in for two seconds and then released it, just like hers), and saw that it was only half-full.  A quick check of the floors revealed only one pair of shoes, a battered pair of sandals she’d never seen him wear.

That was a good sign.  People who snuck off to commit suicide probably didn’t pack their clothes before they did it.

Natalie checked the desk drawers.  No phone, no wallet, no laptop.  No drug paraphernalia, either, so odds were good that Mrs Rudd had been talking out of her arse.  On the windowsill were a few figures carved out of jade.  They looked as if they were meant to be little animals- the Chinese Zodiac, maybe?- but she didn’t dare to pick them up for a closer look.  They looked quite fragile.

She turned round and noticed the wastepaper basket.  It was actually full of paper, like it was supposed to be.  Natalie’s mainly just had crisp packets and used cotton buds, but Alex seemed to have got through a ream or two of A4.

She went over and picked out a crumpled ball of paper from the top.  That was another thing- Alex had crumpled them all, but he didn’t seem to have torn any of them up.  Natalie unfolded the ball, smoothing it out as well as she could, and saw that it was something Alex had printed from the internet.  One of those useless sheets you got at the end of whatever it was you actually wanted to print off, the kind with a few stray words or the copyright information on it that usually amounted to just a waste of ink.

But this time, Natalie noticed something interesting about it.  The date at the bottom was the Thursday before last, and on the top, near the website information, was a little logo reading, Travellodge Brighton.