I missed them long before they were gone.
I stride out to the main gate now, and their voices are still ringing in my ears, and my heart is beating too fast, too loud, so I can’t hear anything else. And I keep my eyes down, so I don’t know if anyone’s watching as shadows stretch around me, but it doesn’t matter because I’m not giving in to it. I promised myself. I swore it. Deep down in the cemetery, in the old part where nobody goes any more, deep in the tangle of ancient trees where even the crosses have been laid to rest. I went there when the world was sleeping beneath the pale of the full moon and I looked down at all the names graven into old stone and I promised myself I would not be the monster they had delivered to the world. I swore I would not follow in their footsteps.
And if the house calls to me to break that promise, and the cemetery haunts my dreams, and the sky itself is full of their lament, school was the place that was quiet. It was still, and easy, until yesterday. Now she’s there, and she sees me. She stares at me and makes me run, bump into people.
So that’s the end of that.
Oh man – he just up and left! Right in the middle of Hargreaves’s lecture on madness as a vehicle. Or whatever. He just stood up, madness as a vehicle himself, steamrolling his way through the room. Bags got kicked up, the desks themselves seemed to shift away as he passed, faces turning, open with shock, Hargreaves swept out of the way.
Incredible.
To the extent that I just watched him leave without even thinking of following him.
‘Well,’ says Hargreaves, running his hand through his hair, his eyes a little wild. ‘Back to the lesson please. I’m sure we’ll see . . . uh. I’m sure he’ll be back . . .’
He doesn’t even remember his name.
Who is Bavar? I mean, how does this stuff just happen? Why don’t people register him properly, even when they’ve seen him?
And now the old me is having a proper battle with the new me. I want to leave. Follow in his footsteps and chase him. But the old me won’t do it. She’s stuck to the wooden chair, pen in hand, listening to Hargreaves drone on, knowing she isn’t invisible, even if Bavar is. So there I sit. But a plan is forming. There’s no way he’s stopped mid-charge to get that ridiculous picnic basket. So I’ll get it for him. I’ll get his address from the office, because he was ill and went home and I need to take his stuff, and I’ll go visit him.
Oh yes.
I didn’t mean to come straight home; it’s way too early. I meant to wander for a bit, so Aoife wouldn’t notice. But I was tired and I couldn’t think of anywhere else I wanted to go, and suddenly the world seemed too small and I was sick of looking at pavements, so here I am.
‘What happened?’ she asks, as I walk into the hall.
This house is the right size for me. I see it with suddenly clarity. I’ve been pretending it isn’t. That it’s vast and cavernous and creepy, and that I’m not also those things too. After today, and that boy’s face when we collided, I can see that I fit just fine here.
I look at Aoife for a long time, wondering what to say. How can I explain that everything is different, just because of one person? She stares back, her expression unchanging.
‘There’s a new girl,’ I say eventually, feeling my cheeks get hot. And then I don’t know what else to say. What does that even mean? How does that explain anything?
Aoife nods.
‘A catalyst,’ she says. ‘And you didn’t want it.’
I shake my head.
‘Come,’ she says. ‘Come with me.’
I follow her into the kitchen and sit at the scarred pine table in the corner. There’s a painting on the wall, an old oil of green fields beneath storm clouds, sheep clustered together beneath a wide-spreading tree. Hiding.
My storm is all around me.
‘It’s all right,’ Aoife says, sitting opposite me. She’s not bustling. Not making tea, cutting cake. She’s just sitting, looking at me. Her dark hair is pulled back from her face, greying at the temples. She’s not so different from my mother. From her daytime face, anyway.
‘How?’
‘It just is,’ she says with a lift of her shoulders. ‘You cannot control everything, Bavar. You are becoming what you were always meant to be. I’ve seen how hard you fight it . . .’
‘I made a promise.’
She shakes her head.
‘I made a promise.’ My voice rises, and her eyes widen as she hears just a hint of the thing deep within.
‘A promise? To whom?’
‘To the world . . . To . . . I don’t know. I made a promise, to myself, that I wouldn’t fight; I wouldn’t be like they were.’
‘A promise cannot change what you are, Bavar.’ She stares at me, and her eyes are bright, and I don’t want to see what is reflected in them. She thinks I can be like them, and still be me, not be a monster. But she’s wrong. She has never felt the way the power corrupts. She was the younger sister; the power didn’t come to her.
I scramble up from the table, knocking it askew. Aoife clasps her hands together as I rise to my full height.
‘One day,’ she calls out, standing as I flee the room, her voice bright. ‘One day you’ll be glad of your true nature. You’ll need it, Bavar!’
I roar as I head up the stairs. I can’t help it. The sound reverberates all around me, and the portraits of my ancestors up high on the walls tremble, and the painted faces stretch their mouths wide and roar with me.
It’s a flipping disaster.
I wait until lunchtime, then I can’t wait any longer. I march up to the office and explain that my friend had to go home sick, and I want to take his things to him. I wave the coat and the basket in the secretary’s face and she blinks.
‘Please?’ I say. ‘It’s January – he’ll need his coat tomorrow, when he’s better.’
I mean to say – as if I care he wears a coat! Frankly, it’s enormous and really heavy and I’d rather not take it. But it seemed a better excuse than the basket. What you going to say about a basket? He might need it for his baking?
‘Bavar, you say,’ she turns to the computer screen. ‘Bavar. What’s his surname?’
‘Uh . . .’
‘Oh, here he is. Bavar. That is his surname. And his . . .’ She frowns. ‘Must have missed something on the entry form . . . here we are, Meridown House, Dragon Hill.’