He takes the camera off his chest and I can hear his fingers tapping as if they’re inside my head. Then suddenly a bright torch illuminates a whole tunnel of colour. Letters I can’t read forming words that zigzag across the cracks. Eyes drawn on the ceiling that look down at us. Pennies, stuck with what I think might be chewing gum, reflecting the torchlight like the scales of a barracuda.

Rowan puts me back on his chest, but keeps the light on.

‘So, what’ll it be, Alice?

We breaking and entering?’

‘I don’t fully condone …’

I laugh, and it

b o o m e r a n g s

through the tunnel and back

as I swing the gate shut behind us.

We walk. More slowly than we would if we were above on the streets with the cars and the rain and the people. Even so, my heart is beating like it did after Cecelia broke the nose on that dinosaur and we ran away before anyone could see what she’d done.

This feels the same. We’re hushed like we’re hiding. Breathing like we’re running.

We tilt our heads, reading the messages that different people have left on the walls.

‘“Dance like no one is watching, 2013”,’ I read in red. ‘My mum has that sign up in the living room.’

Well, at least I think she still does.

‘Kimmi loves cock, 2011.’

She tuts out of the speakers

like an old lady.

‘Have you been here before?’

I swallow.

‘Yeah.

I used to come here with my mam.’

And I haven’t been back, have I?

Not since it happened.

‘Your mum?’

It feels strange that he would bring his mum to a place like this. If I ever picked a lock, I can’t imagine my mum ever walking through. Dad, on the other hand …

The signal dips for a moment and I hold my breath. But when he comes back on, I see he’s stopped walking and has stepped back, so the torch from his camera phone has washed out a wall ahead.

At the bottom, I can make out pots of paint and brushes, spray cans and rainbow stencils.

And then, as the light adjusts, I see it.

I don’t know why I’m this nervous.

She’s just some girl

at the other end of a camera.

But I guess hers are the first eyes to see this

since Mam’s.

And I wonder what she’s going to see.

It’s a family of humpback whales.

The largest one is crashing through the waves at the top, fountaining a technicolour rainstorm from its blowhole. Its skin is crinkled with hundreds of different cracks and crosses, all wrinkled, up close, but then stretching wide into a giant from afar. And under its fins are two smaller whales, sheltered from the waterfall of yellows and oranges and reds above.