I was put in a room on my own for a while. There was a hatch in the door; every now and again someone would look in, to see if I was getting ill too. Some food would appear once in a while. I banged on the door, but no one came. After a long bit, some nurses in high white hats marched in to look at me. They knocked on my head with their knuckles, they listened to my chest to see if I was going hollow. I don’t know exactly how long they kept me in the room waiting, but in the end the door was opened, and men with gold bay leaves looked me up and down and nodded to each other and said, ‘Not this one. For some reason, not this one.’

Some people it took, the illness. And some it didn’t. I was one of the lucky ones. Perhaps, perhaps I wasn’t. It depends which side you come down on. It had all happened before. Heap Fever, as it was called, came and went; this was the first bout of it since I was born.

There was a place for children like me, those made orphans by the illness. It was situated against a bit of the heap wall that was said to have been built just after Actoyviam’s time, and sometimes, if there was a bad storm in the heaps, some object might lift up and dash itself upon the roof. It was a place full of snivelling and yelling, a lot of cowering and swearing went on in those soiled rooms. Every one of us it was certain should be married to the heaps when we came of age, there was no escaping the heaps from that place. And we listened to them smashing and shifting and groaning in the night and knew that, soon enough, we’d be out there in the thick of it. We were got up in very worn black dresses and pointed leather caps that was the uniform of the orphanage; the leather cap was a sign that we belonged to the heaps, that soon enough we’d be out there. Before the illness came, I’d often seen the orphans being marched through Filching in their leather caps; we were not allowed to speak to them, they were always so silent, and there were always unhappy-looking adults marching alongside them. Sometimes, one of us might whistle out to them or call to them, but there was never any answer, and now, there I was, in a leather cap myself, marked out.