His mother shook him awake, he didn’t know how many minutes later. He swiped away the dribble from the corner of his mouth and picked up his daddy’s medal from the floor. He had passed out. Maggie thought he was sleeping. It was better that way. His legs felt like jelly as he followed her to the kitchen. It was a small but warm space, with Maggie’s paintings on the wall and some stuff she had bought from a charity shop after they moved in decorating the space. Some dying posies sat on the windowsill next to the big white sink. Stuck to the fridge were some of the drawings he’d made in school – the regular pictures, not the scary ones his teacher had made such a fuss about. After that, he’d learned to draw tortoises instead of what was in his head. He looked at the photo of his daddy, taken in happy times when he was well. They were at the zoo seeing the giant tortoises and Elliott was sitting on his father’s shoulders. He’d felt like a giant that day too. But then they came home to Slayton, a place where the air was heavy somehow, and he always had a feeling of being watched. A lump rose in his throat and he swallowed it back down.

The smell of Bisto curled around him when he sat down to eat. Maggie’s eyes were bright with worry as she asked for the hundredth time if he was OK. Nodding, he kept quiet. Quiet couldn’t get him in trouble. Quiet was safe. In school, he tried extra hard to act like a regular kid, especially during the days he felt scared. But Miss Grogan watched him all the time. That’s why she had called the children’s so-shall-care. The women who came to their house didn’t seem very caring to him. All they did was make Maggie worry, asking if anyone had hurt him. It wasn’t Mummy’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s. After a few weeks the women from the so-shall-care stopped coming around. They said he had an ‘overactive imagination’ and was ‘processing’ what happened to his dad. But Elliott didn’t want to be different. He wanted to be like everyone else.