He pressed the tatty old bear he’d had since he was a baby to his chest and whispered another question, crossing both sets of his fingers.

Will we be happy here?

He tipped the ball and it slowly revealed its answer.

My reply is no.

7

Now

My earliest memories come to me not in pictures, but sounds. The frantic pump of a spinning top. The twist of a key in a clockwork mouse. The mechanical winding of a jack-in-the-box crank.

Half a pound of tuppenny rice. Half a pound of treacle. That’s the way the money goes. Pop goes the weasel.

Birdie would settle me in a corner of our shop and surround me with toys. She would pull them from the shelves, ignoring the price tags, generous with these expensive knickknacks, if not her affections.

The floor was always cold, but it did not matter. My childish fingers would grasp for the top, a crazy, whirring riot of color and motion. I would lurch after the mouse on unsteady legs. But it was always jack-in-the-box that held the most fascination.

Le diable en boîte. A boxed devil, like me.

A prelate once saved a village from a drought by discovering a well with healing powers. He was so holy he caught the devil in a boot. Folklore, of course, but bound in truth.

Like the devil, I was cast out.

My mothers didn’t want me. Not my birth mother, whose name I never knew. Not Bridget, my adoptive mother, besotted by the curled fists and rounded cheeks of a baby—“Come to Birdie, come to Mama”—but who fell out of love as my views and behavior took on a different shape from her own. Used her own fists to mold me into the type of child she could be proud of. Pinched me. Slapped me. Pressed the vicious edges of her watch’s metal strap into my face whenever we were running late. Ticktock. Ticktock. Ticktock.

Her tongue was as sharp as a shard of glass. Some days, I dreamed of cutting it out. Imagined her mouth filling with blood. Choking her. The bladed edges of her viciousness reduced to a stump, blunted and useless.

But the jack-in-the-box, I loved. The surprise of it. And then, when I knew what was coming, the anticipation of that surprise.

Death is like that. One knows it is coming. Old age. Illness. The gradual decline of one’s body. But for some, it is not like that at all. Their death is abrupt. A shock.

The five-car motorway pileup in the early hours of the morning. A stroke in the armchair on a Sunday afternoon. An accidental drowning in a lake on a summer’s evening.

A murder.

It strikes me as curious that there are millions upon millions of people in this world, but only a few will share with me this particular human experience. The deliberate taking of a life that does not belong to us. It is intoxicating, like being a god in the sky.