Then there was Annie Waters, who I’d heard talking about her new horse at school. I’d felt a sudden, heavy sense of dread, followed by an equally sudden, raging headache that took hours to fade. Later on, we’d been told that she’d been thrown off that horse and hit her head, and they weren’t sure whether she’d be able to walk again. She didn’t come back to school, and I never found out what happened to her after that.

But honestly… what could I have said that would have stopped Annie, or the nurse upstairs?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

So what was the point of having these inklings of disaster? Maybe there was no point. In which case… it seemed like the best thing was to keep quiet and pretend they didn’t exist.

After all, what about Mum and Ava? If I told them about the bad-weather feelings and they didn’t believe me, it would hurt me… and if they did believe me, wouldn’t it hurt them?

For me to be living in a dreamworld or always with my nose in a book or the other, slightly less kind things Ava sometimes said about me, was fine – not fine exactly, annoying or irritating, but not scary. But if I knew things I couldn’t possibly know – well, that would be much harder for everybody to accept. Me included.

I decided not to say anything about Mark.

As time went on, I gradually became aware, on and off, of the cloud he seemed to trail around behind him. One day, out of the blue, it occurred to me what it might be. Guilt. A guilt he couldn’t escape. But what on earth could he have done that he felt so bad about?

I watched and waited in case there would be something clearer, a sign it would actually be possible to act on. I kept on reading the books he’d given me, as if touching the leather covers he himself had handled might bring me closer to understanding what he might be capable of.

But nothing happened. When Mum said he was going to be taking all three of us to France I felt only excitement. Perfectly ordinary, common-or-garden excitement.

I preoccupied myself with the question of the clothes I might need. Ava was the same as me, maybe even worse. After a token show of fretting about revision for the GCSE exams she’d have to take when we came back, she seemed to see the trip as an opportunity to get a whole new wardrobe. Luckily, Mark seemed to be more than willing to pay for everything. It was a dream, really – so much money, so much shopping.

I stopped noticing the shadow Mark sometimes seemed to have; I even asked myself if it had ever really been there. Maybe it had faded. Or maybe I just couldn’t see it any more.

The big day came closer: my first time on a plane, my first trip to France, my first journey overseas. Ava’s too, though she was obviously embarrassed to have got to her age without ever flying, and wouldn’t admit what a big deal it was.