We know, Mousey. Don’t we? But we’re never going to tell. Some things are too secret even to whisper to the reeds. That’s why I tore these pages out. I was going to burn them. But now I have a better idea. I’m making a time capsule. I’m going to leave some things inside—you know, to mark the occasion. The card I wrote to Mr. Clarke. The pages from my diary. That copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. My list of special albums. I’m putting it all in a box. Then I’m wrapping it in plastic. Then I’m going to bury it, somewhere safe, by the clay pits.

After that, well, who knows? Maybe I’ll forget where it is. Maybe I’ll get on with my life, and take exams, and leave home, and get a job, and maybe one day get married, have kids, maybe even a cat or a dog. Sometimes I think about those things. Sometimes, it even seems possible to put aside my memories, to wrap them in layers of plastic; to bury them deep, where no one will look; where no one will think of looking.

Good-bye, Mr. Clarke. Good-bye, clay pits. Good-bye, happy memories. Maybe I’ll be back for you, one day, when it’s safe to look. Till then, I’m putting childish things aside. Look after them for me, Mousey.

Chapter 5

5

January 1982

I buried my father on January 6, a Wednesday, in the morning. My mother was there, in a gray dress and two overcoats. She told me, very earnestly, that there was a thief at the Meadowbank home; that someone had been stealing her clothes.

“The only way to stop them,” she said, “is to wear everything all the time.” She lowered her voice and smiled at me confidingly. “I’m wearing three pairs of tights,” she said. “And look—” She showed me her pockets, which, I saw, were bulging with socks. “Let’s see those fuckers steal from me now,” she said, again with that childish, confiding smile. (My mother had once been a woman whose loathing of profanity had banned even the word damn from our house. It was this, and not the fact that she seemed to have no idea of whose funeral we were attending, that finally brought it home to me that she and my father were equally gone.)

I put my arm around her. Under the thickness of the wool she felt like an armful of birds. She said: “Perhaps we’ll have rabbit tonight. You know how much you like it.”

I nodded and said: “That would be nice.”

I never saw her as lucid again.