And it hit me. Death is forever. A hole in the ground. A headstone. People walking around on the grass above you, while you’re down there in the earth. Kids watching TV; playing soccer; doing their homework; growing up. Except that Bunny would never grow up. Bunny was gone forever. And if Bunny could die, then anyone could. Mum. Dad. Miss McDonald. Me. Unless I believed in Heaven, of course. And all that, forever, unless I believed.

And that was it, Mousey. I didn’t believe. I knew about Jesus, and Heaven, and Hell. I believed in them all, in the same way I believed in Santa and the Easter Bunny. But I believed in Death more. God was small. Death was huge. I used to lie in bed at night, trying to imagine it. All that forever, just waiting for me—

I told myself that I had at least sixty years before I really needed to think about it, but somehow sixty didn’t seem long, compared to all that eternity. I used to lie awake at night, paralyzed by the numbers. Nothing—no one—could help me. Mum and Dad were too busy with arrangements, then too busy with praying and support groups to care much about what I was doing. I remember the long, whistling silences around the table at mealtimes; the way my mother looked at me; the whispers from the people at Church.

If I’d been the one who died, I thought, would my brother have understood? Or would I have just been a photograph in someone’s photo album, like Grandma and Grandpa, who died before I was even born, and who I always remembered in black and white, like an old film? I’d always known that people died. But the thought that I would too—Mousey, I thought I’d go crazy. And then you taught me to play The Game, and everything changed for both of us.

Now I was friends with Mousey at school, but I wasn’t supposed to play with him. Dad was very strict about that. White City boys were a different class. They didn’t even go to Church. Mousey came to our house just once, when I was new at Netherton Green. We played trains in my bedroom. Mum made oatmeal biscuits. Dad looked in a couple of times, I guess to see if Mousey was “sound.” And then, when Mousey had gone, they explained that Mousey wasn’t Our Kind of Boy, and that I wasn’t to invite him anymore. Maybe it was because he’d eaten all the biscuits. Anyway, I never did invite him back to play at my house, but Mousey liked the old churchyard, and so I’d go there to meet him, and we’d lie down on a gravestone and play at being dead, which was basically just lying there, seeing who could keep his eyes shut for the longest.