Without moving, I trained my ears on the direction the sound was coming from. The sound was strange, unidentifiable. Uneven and raw. It was definitely not coming from the front door and it wasn’t coming from upstairs, so it couldn’t be the boiler having a tantrum.

I remained where I was for a while, my legs pinned under me, eyes wide. I listened. An idea crossed my mind. No, I told myself, you’re not imagining it. You’re not a little girl any more. You know what’s real and what’s not. But I thought about Polly and doubt crept around my mind like a sneaky rat. As a little girl I’d had an imaginary friend called Polly. Polly had looked exactly like me, but she’d been mute. I had played imaginary games with her whenever the opportunity arose and sometimes we just sat beside one another, keeping each other company. One day when I was six, Mother had said I was too old for her and told me I had to make Polly disappear from my head or she would. Worried about what Mother might do, I had ignored Polly until she had shaken her head sadly at me and vanished. I never saw her again, no matter how hard I tried to.

With a frown, I pushed myself up from the chair. The sound is real. It’s real.

I had to see where it was coming from.

I tiptoed across the living room and carefully opened the door to the dining room. The noise was slightly clearer here. The oak floorboards creaked underfoot and I cringed and leapt through the door into Mother’s kitchen. Again, the noise was louder in here – louder than before. My eyes fell on the Venetian blinds and I froze. The strange sound was coming from outside. Outside in the back garden. I was sure of it.

The blinds remained, as always, shut, drawn down over the wooden boards that had been nailed over the windows. Nailed firmly over the glass so no light could break in.

I had never heard anything like this sound from outside before. Outside sounds to me were the perfect twitter of busy birds, the mad onslaught of hail-beasts and the pitter-patter or hammer-attack of rain – depending on its mood – spooky wind wails, thunder roars and the grumbly engine of Mother’s car.

Just as I wasn’t allowed outside, there were certain places in the cottage that I was not allowed to go. I wasn’t allowed in Mother’s room and I had been banned from the spare room a few months ago. I thought about the spare room. Mother had carried boxes into that room and spent a lot of time in there recently, but she wouldn’t tell me why. I wanted to know but didn’t dare ask.