So she lies quiescent, as she has for months, unable to twitch so much as a finger while you sleep the satisfied sleep of a mortal body well fed and exercised. Perhaps in your dreams of wind over the red country you hear a distant voice: Oh fuck Laura I’ve been so stupid. Laura please you have to know. No one else knows.

Help me. Help me. Help me.

chapter twenty-nine OATHBOUND

You know, or can know, everything that happens in your territory. Its boundaries are the boundaries of Chetwood School: to the lake, to the woods, to the high garden walls where former boarding houses were sold off to become detached six-bedroom character-property London-commutable mansions, to the ancient hedgerows that mark the boundaries with farmers’ fields of wheat and sugar beet and blooming yellow rapeseed. There is a ribbon of tarmac blindness through the middle of your world, but the tendrils of your power extend over it, especially around the CAUTION SCHOOL zebra crossing. These days, drivers cutting through country lanes to dodge traffic on the A1 do, in fact, find themselves exercising caution because of the school. A miracle.

You know, through your extended web of defensive perception, when Years Ten to Thirteen troop en masse down the road to Chetwood village on Sunday. A few teachers go along to supervise the ritual of the day out. On this lovely sunny May weekend, they are mostly supervising from a big table with a green parasol in front of the pub, and though they are in loco parentis, they don’t see that as any reason to resist a pint. Meanwhile the students slope around on the green, and hang around in the pub, and take up every table in the Chetwood Caff (cheap) and the Village Sweetheart Tea Shoppe (expensive), as well as most of the picnic tables round the back of Mutchins’ Garden Centre and Dahlia Nursery. Occasionally a little murmur of displeased town-and-gown hostility stirs in the village—there are a lot of teenagers, and they do make the place look untidy—but you have delivered your share of stern Respecting Our Community assemblies, and the locals running the shops know which side their bread is buttered. Very few of these children blink at paying nearly twenty quid for a burger and chips with coleslaw left uneaten on the side, and then using the change to stuff themselves with local-farm-shop ice cream from the big freezer at the garden centre. Once Year Thirteen have their IDs, they positively throw money at the Red Lion in exchange for overpriced alcopops. It’s important, after all, to feel grown-up.

You have not been down to the village yourself in some time. You are inflexibly territorial. You will not leave your school.