Now Prin feels a stubbornness well up inside her. ‘Of course it was!’ she says. ‘She held her arms out, she made the wings, she only had to jump and she’d do it. We were both imagining. Imagining really hard!’

‘So what was it you imagined? That she would fly?’

‘Yes! I imagined that because it’s what she wanted, because I really, really wanted her to stop crying and because her mummy and daddy were up there waiting!’

The lady looks at her for a long time, very still. And very serious. ‘But you know the difference, really, don’t you? Between what’s real and what’s imaginary? What’s true and what’s … Make-Believe?’

Prin shakes her head. ‘I didn’t push her,’ she repeats. ‘She jumped and she flew.’

‘But –’ the lady leans right down close – ‘but do you see that it wasn’t real? No matter how hard the two of you imagined, it was only ever pretend?’

Prin looks up again. Her stomach clenches. She realizes it then, like a cold douse of water. This lady knows things. She is a psychologist. She knows better than Mum, she knows more even than Daddy. This lady is clever.

And this lady is right.

A few weeks later, everything seems to be back to normal. Prin is back at school and Mum’s fine and Daddy’s back at work.

Sarah Jane isn’t living with them any more.

The zoetrope never did get mended. The dent was too bad: it doesn’t spin any more. So Prin decides to cut it up. She can use the little pictures for something else. She goes through into Daddy’s office. She knows he keeps a sharp pair of scissors in there.

When she opens his desk drawer and lifts out the scissors, underneath she finds a piece of paper. With her name on it.

Prin sets the scissors down on the desk. She pulls out the piece of paper. It is stapled to three, four more sheets. Prin’s name appears on them all. Sarah Jane’s name appears on it too.

Prin can read the words in the report, even if she can’t understand what they all mean. But there is one phrase she can make out quite clearly.

… potentially in great danger, if she should go on living with this child.

Very carefully and slowly, Prin slides the report back into the drawer. Feeling very cold and very hollow, she takes the scissors back to her room and sits on her bed, hands clasped very tightly.

She thinks for a long time about what she’s read in those pages. What it says about her. She sits there until the sun moves round and her room grows dim, the blades of the scissors digging deep runnels into her palms. And she promises never to do it again.

Chapter 34