I liked Miss McDonald. I liked her a lot. She went to our Church, and sometimes, if we were good, she would play the guitar during Storytime. She used to wear a blue Indian-print dress with little bells stitched on the hem, and though she was old—twenty-five, at least—she was totally gorgeous. I was the classroom monitor. I wore a badge and everything. I used to bring the chalk from out of the stock cupboard every day, and sometimes I used to stand on a chair and wipe the board clean with the board-rubber. I also watered the plants, collected books, stuck gold stars on the star chart, and looked after the class hamster.

Miss McDonald called me her “special little helper.” Mousey helped too, but only because I let him. Mousey was from the White City development. He had two brothers, but no dad. My dad didn’t like him, because his mum didn’t go to Church, and because she was a cleaner. But Mousey was okay. We used to go to the graveyard down by old St. Mary’s Church, and lie down on gravestones and play dead.

In the days before God took my brother, I’d never thought about death. Perhaps I was too young to get my head around that kind of thing. Or perhaps I was in that state of grace that Mr. Speight keeps talking about. Of course my parents had mentioned it. They told me that you went to sleep, and then you woke up in Heaven. And for a while, I believed them. The way I believed in Santa Claus, and babies coming from cabbages. Grown-ups lie to kids all the time. The Tooth Fairy; the Virgin Birth; how the red stuff doesn’t sting; and how the ice-cream truck only plays music when they’ve run out of ice cream. Kids are pretty stupid like that. They’ll believe almost anything.

And then, Bunny died, and suddenly I was an only child again. Nothing else seemed to have changed. I still went to school; there was still TV, with Play School and Scooby-Doo and Looney Tunes and Doctor Who. The sun still rose in the mornings. Bedtime was still at the same time. Everything went on as before, except that Bunny wasn’t there. His toys were still in his toy box. His cot with its patchwork coverlet was still there, forever empty. It’s not that I cared about him much. But the thought that he could just be gone, while his toys and his cot were still around—