For the first time in a long time I feel the pull of the giant puppet master in the sky. I thought she had left me, but lo, here she is, speaking through me at my darkest hour, and I have to hand it to her, this is the worst dictate she’s ever sent, but I’m powerless to resist. I missed her – weirdly, I missed being possessed.

Nico surprises me by saying, ‘I will do it too,’ and as she starts to write in beautiful looped handwriting, she blinks and bites down hard, winning the battle with her tears.

41. Nico

41

Nico

Sammy’s plan will never work, and I’m only going along with it to do something, anything, to stop feeling so powerless, which must be why she thought of it in the first place, like the story we made up about climbing onto cloud-horses.

This tiny piece of paper is her call to action, but I feel as if we are being summoned over the top of the trenches, as in the stories of the soldiers Miss Iliescu told us about, some of whom were only young boys. Pointless – but if it helps build morale, then why not try to pretend? And there comes a point where a bullet would be preferable to constant fear, starvation and frostbite, gangrene and rot.

We are in the car and the fat man’s bulges are winking at us from behind his collar. We don’t speak, as we both have the slips of paper rolled under our tongues, and we’re trying not to swallow them, or dissolve them with our saliva. Sammy has instructed me to keep a look out for any landmarks, to give directions should any of the men want to help. Even though she knows this plan will not work, she needs to believe it might.

The driver zig-zags to confuse us; every time we take a journey the car takes us to a big roundabout that you can get to by going left or right at the top of the road, out of the maze of houses. It is never possible to read the signs as the windows are dusky and smudge the outside, and I’m not even sure it’s always the same roundabout. Round we go and out onto a big, fast, flowing road. I notice a tall narrow building which looks like a spire spiking the sky, and then hedges and road signs, though I can’t see any names.