Cover

BOOKS BY DAVID HOFMEYR

Stone Rider

The Between

Dedication

For Adam and Brune,

who live between London and Paris

Epigraph

How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?

—Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1

First you lift. Then you float. Then you Fall.

That’s how it happens—the FALLING. It’s frightening and it hurts. It feels as if your bones are being crushed. Your insides, ripped out. Your body is being force-fed through a meat grinder. It disorientates, disturbs and it dazzles the mind. Flips normal upside down, inside out and back to front.

Yes. These things are all true. But it’s not the Falling that matters. It’s what happens after.

Sol

1

Between school and home lies a path through the woods. It’s Friday afternoon and the sun falls from a cloudless blue sky. It’s baking hot. No hint of wind. We’re alone on the narrow path. But in my gut, I get that nervy feeling. A darkening. Something, hidden in the trees, is following me.

“I had that dream again last night,” I tell Bea to distract myself.

“No kidding? The same one?”

“Yeah. Kinda. I woke and found myself in an empty house. I stepped out onto the street and the whole place was deserted. Everyone had vanished….” I don’t have the courage to tell her the rest—a new part of the dream. The tall, spider-like creature I saw moving among the bombed-out buildings of a desolate city.

We hit a thorny stretch of the path, crossing a park in the heart of London, cut off from the clamour. I feel dizzy in the heat. Bea leaps up, fluid and light, snaps off a dead tree branch, lands and dances forward, swinging the stick like a sword.

“I can interpret the dream, if you like,” she says.

“No you can’t.”

“Easy.”

“Fine. Go for it.”

“It’s panic,” Bea says.

“What?”

“Blind panic you’ll never find The One. Always be alone. Always searching.” She laughs and stabs the air. “Got Anaïs Moon written all over it.”

—

Anaïs Isabel Moon. Me. But to everyone other than Bea (for reasons of her maverick lawlessness), I’m just Ana. Three letters. Two syllables. A palindrome. I was born abroad, in Paris. The Old Man and Frankie were studying at the Sorbonne. Frankie, Business. The Old Man, Arts. They were both in a phase—experimenting.

—

We pass under the eaves of a hunkered oak, its branches like arms, wide and bent, and here the path is walled in by nettles and thorns. Something moves, at the edge of my vision, in the shadowy green. A figure? The sprawl of wings?

I spin around. See nothing.

It’s back again—that raw, uncomfortable feeling, a sense of being watched. It quickens in my step, plays a drumbeat of dread in my heart.