And he saw it all again; it was always with him, but sometimes it came over him all at once like a sudden faintness. He had known last night that it was almost on him again. The room through the slats in the wardrobe door looked unusually bright. The memory was in broken pieces, but the fragments were strung together by the feeling of cold that accompanied them, the icy shiver going through him, through him and through him, and the world seeming to slant and go into slow motion as in a nightmare. There was no noise except the throb of blood in his ears and a sound like the rushing of wings.

He saw the bedroom door opening, and he saw Nicky coming in. Then there was a short gap before the next picture, which was Nicky standing in the middle of the room, looking around him. Tommy felt through the cold that his brother was searching for somewhere to hide, and he knew that Nicky had frozen, just like Tommy himself had, and could not make a decision.

Then the next moment Tommy was whispering, “Nicky, Nicky,” and pushing the wardrobe door open a crack. And Nicky came in quickly to join him. They huddled together in the dark and waited. Nicky’s hand was in Tommy’s. In this version, Nicky was allowed to grow up, and eventually he got married and had children of his own.

Then there was the other version in which Tommy felt nothing but the cold going through him, and he did not speak.

In this version, the next fragment was his father walking into the room, very slow and calm, sliced into neat layers by the slats in the door. And the picture after that was the shotgun. Nothing seemed to move, and so there seemed no interval at all between that moment and the picture that came next of the blood on the wall, in streaks through the slats in the wardrobe. Tommy stayed where he was throughout it all, not even breathing now, trying to control his shivering, and he watched his father turn and seem to stare straight at him, as though he could see through the wardrobe door. And there was nothing else after that, nothing except the icy cold inside him and the knowledge that whatever he did now he would never get warm.

PART 2

1

Katrina’s mother said, “We don’t have any secrets. People who love each other don’t have secrets.”
Katrina, although she was only eleven at this point, was starting to wish that they did have some secrets. Her mother had told her recently, for instance, that she found it difficult to orgasm during penetrative sex. Katrina didn’t fully understand every element of this information, but she knew she was being told something adult and horrifying, and it brought a twisty feeling to her stomach and a hotness to her face.