He left the living room, ignoring the trill of laughter from one of the women, and headed back outside into the lengthening afternoon. He walked and walked, taking himself off down the paths he was fondest of, through Fiddler’s Wood and down through the fields and further, out past the hedgerows and thickets until he came to paved roads. He walked these too, walking further than he ever had, with the sun pressing hot on his head and his mind carefully blank.

The sun was inching towards the horizon when he came to the outskirts of a small village. There were cars parked outside cottages set back from the road, and a little further in, he could see a pub sign swinging from a black and white building. There were people here, he realized. People who might wonder what a fourteen-year-old stranger was doing wandering by himself; people who might even know his family. Jumping as though he had been doused with a bucket of water, Michael turned to head back to the fields, suddenly feeling terribly exposed – he was the mouse out after dark, caught in the shadow of the owl – and that was when he saw her.

A figure in a red coat, standing just by a low drystone wall. She was leaning back, her pale face tipped up to the last of the sun, grinning. Her sharp white fingers were spread against the grey stone, but he knew that they could move fast. They could be touching him in moments.

He ran.

There was movement as he passed her, and he sensed her turning her head to look at him, sensed her sharp hands reaching out, and he knew that if he felt the feathery touch of her fingers he would faint dead away, and that would be it, he would be back there, in the cupboard, at the mercy of his family again – at the mercy of his mother, who beat him, his father, who hated him, and his sister … who came to him at night, with her red coat and her sharp smile.

She did not catch him. Instead he ran wildly out into the fields, running until he was back under the blessed trees again, and eventually his terror became something else. Something red. He rubbed his face angrily, outraged at the tears he felt there and the slow throb of the stitch in his side.

It’s not right.