It’s a new streamer. And the thumbnail by their name is dark, like they might be existing at the bottom of a black sea, too.

My heart kick-starts again and now I’m shaking, because I have a new window. A window that could be a world apart from bad things or lives that could be lost at any moment. A window that’s open and ready for me to climb through and leave my body and all its broken parts behind.

I rub the growing pain just above my eye. I click.

And I climb through.

Connecting to Rowan …

10

Rowan

And now I am strapped to the chest of a person I don’t know as they walk through what I think is a long tunnel.

There’s light up ahead, and the view rocks from side to side as they walk unsteadily. I can hear footsteps echoing and I hold my breath like I used to do when I drove through tunnels with Dad, back before the Illness. And I can almost hear the sound boomeranging back and pushing me – making me feel as if I might never take a breath again – as yellow strip lights strobe above us in time to my heartbeat. And we’re racing – racing towards the finish line, where there’s a whole new life waiting, with crisp, fresh air. But we’re not going fast enough and the thrill of perhaps not being able to make it charges through my bones.

But the light is getting closer now, flaring up on the camera as the lens adjusts. And I want us to keep walking into that light. Into that new life where there’s no such thing as shadow.

But instead the new streamer stops. Turns. And looks at the tunnel wall.

I let out my breath.

Why are we looking at the tunnel wall when there’s a whole new world waiting in the light? It’s just a wall. Someone has even graffitied over the concrete cracks with criss-cross signs and symbols, like a giant game of noughts and crosses. I want us to turn and keep walking towards the light, to where the Living is done. But we don’t move. We just keep staring.

My stomach sinks. This was supposed to be a new window, but now I’m lumbered with someone who likes to look at walls instead of doing any of the things I’d do if my body worked as it did before. Like swim to impossible places and see colour burst out of the blue.

But then I look. Really look. And, as I’m staring, I see the lines drawn on the wall are criss-crossing into something bigger. Bigger than me and even the wall itself. The tiny scratches of colour zigzag into each other to make a line. To make an eye. To make eight legs with hundreds of tiny suckers on each one.