After registration Izzy and I set off to history. The corridor was so full of real children that it was unremarkable. The day slipped back into being normal, or as normal as a day can be when you’re particularly aware of the fact that pretty much everyone else has a mother and you don’t, and you’d give anything to have her back. And that she’s been gone very nearly a full year and you will never see her again.

I thought I might go to the Garden of Remembrance after school to talk to her about the hallucinations. The problem was that I hated it. This was a conundrum I often faced: there was a plaque in the garden with ANNA BROWN on it, and her dates, and it was the only place that felt like ‘going to see Mum’.

But it was right next to the crematorium and there was always, always a funeral on. People would be standing around, wearing black, and it reminded me that everyone died, and that it happened all the time.

All the other places, though, had been overwritten by things that had happened since. Nowhere else was so uncontaminatedly ‘Mum’.

When I was leaving at the end of the day, I saw a boy out in the paved part of the playground. A tall boy with messy ginger hair was mooching around by himself. He looked distraught, and something about the way he was moving, his jerky walk, his spasms of grief, spoke to something in me. I was beginning to think that once you’d known actual sadness, real loss, you could recognize it in other people and I saw it in this boy.

I didn’t recognize him from my year group, but it was a big school and I didn’t know everyone. He could have been in Year Ten.

As I headed towards him I saw him pick up a piece of stone from the ground. There were often pebbles around that were a bit chalky, or that left a trail if you wrote with them. They were mainly used by boys to draw cocks on the tarmac. I watched him write on the wall. He was attacking it, and I walked faster, wanting to see what he was doing.

When I got there, though, I saw that he wasn’t wearing our school uniform. He was wearing a burgundy sweatshirt. He was one of them. I shivered, and the boy was gone, like a TV switching off.

I looked at the words on the wall, still there even though he’d gone from my vision. They just said:

HELP ME

8

I wake after a nightmare. Someone smashed me on the head until I was dead.