Most of all afterwards he remembered the cold that had gone all the way through him and the way his heart seemed to have escaped from his chest and now was beating everywhere his body, in his legs and his arms and his head. It was so loud in his head that after a time he could not hear any more shots. He didn’t notice he had wet himself until much later, when his soaking pyjamas had gone cold and he started to shiver. It was a strange and rare knowledge, the discovery of what the human body does when it is in terror. He had felt fear before and since, but never like this. Mortal terror was something different. A hard thing, to find you are just an animal, in desperate fright, trying to save itself. He would not forget.

There was a built-in wardrobe along the far wall of the room that his father had installed some years before. Tommy’s father was proud of this wardrobe. He said it was “modern”. It was made of light-coloured wood, with several different sections—two big ones in the middle, and two smaller ones on either side. Four wardrobes in one, Tommy’s father had boasted. Tommy chose—though there seemed no conscious choice in it—the narrow section on the far left, where old coats and some of his mother’s dresses hung. He crawled in and pulled the door closed behind him. The clothes smelled of his mother. He pushed himself as far back as he could. He wanted complete darkness, but there were slats in the door allowing slivers of light through, and allowing him to see thin slices of the room from where he was. For a time he screwed his eyes shut. He wasn’t thinking anything at all when the door of the bedroom was pushed open.

Most people got to spend their whole lives never knowing whether they were good or bad. What beautiful safety there must be in that. Walking down the street in London, waiting to cross at traffic lights, sitting at his desk at work, Tom always knew the kind of person he was. Once you knew, you carried it with you forever. Other people might behave badly at times—lie or cheat or manipulate—and then they might feel guilty for a while, but mostly they would still think of themselves as good. Not perfect, perhaps, but certainly not bad, not at their core. It would be so peaceful, he thought, to be able to move through the world like that. Tom wasn’t sure how many other people were out there who had truly been tested, and who had truly failed; people who, in that crucial moment, had made a terribly wrong choice and then had to live with it afterwards, marked in a way that only they could see, haunted forever by their shame.

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