I eyed the doorway nervously. I took a step towards it. But I couldn’t leave the little girl alone in that horrible place.
It wasn’t a room. It was a cell.
So I walked over slowly and lifted her up with shaking muscles.
I hadn’t held another person without subsequently throwing them for the longest time. Every muscle in my body automatically tensed. Throw, hurt, smash, wreck, went the training in my head. I swallowed, hard, until the voice disappeared and my muscles softened. Then I gulped, and reached right back to another time, another place.
My hand lifted and I found myself stroking her cheek. It was so soft. The room seemed to peel away from me for a moment.
There was a small scrap of a nametape sewn in the back of her cardigan. I squinted at it in the gloom.
‘Mary,’ I said aloud, as if in a daze.
The little girl clapped her hands in delight. ‘Mary,’ she said, nodding emphatically as if hearing something important.
‘Mary?’ I gasped. ‘You mean … all this time, you were trying to remember your name?’
She looked around the cold fake nursery, its corners that pulsed with silence, and shivered. I held her more snugly, safe from the gloom, and she gave a shuddering sigh of contentment.
‘You needed help remembering, didn’t you? Cos you’d forgotten a bit, right? But now we know. You’re Mary. That’s who you are.’
Suddenly I saw the room through her eyes. How frightened she must have been, stuck in there, day after day, trying to remember who she’d been once. She was so small, so alone. She needed someone to stick up for her.
They all did.
I moved my brain in directions it hadn’t been in for a while. I thought about other people – the others who were here with me. Sweet Vanessa, the pleaser, who willingly let people laugh at her, who thought her death was her fault. Isolde, who’d never been inside in her life, and was now trapped for ever, yet longed to feel the fresh air once more. Obediah and Theo – pain flew across me – who had never known kindness, not in their lifetime, not from the adults who should have protected them when they were at their most vulnerable, and certainly not now, and didn’t even think to question that.
And then, finally, I turned my thoughts to Scanlon Lane.
He’d always been able to see me. But had I ever properly seen him? Had I looked into his heart, and seen the love floundering around in there, with nowhere to go, no one to lavish it on?
I’d got him all wrong. He wasn’t sticking around for the money, or the condo, or the flash cloud-car. He didn’t want to be in charge of us. He wanted to be with us. He wanted to make amends. That was all he’d ever wanted. And now that was drawing to a deadly conclusion. It had turned into guilt. That was why he’d offered to take the poison: to stay with us for ever. It meant he wouldn’t have more ghosts on his conscience. He was willing to sacrifice himself for us.
And just like that, something warm began to move through my frozen corpse. He loved us. And I had to set him free. I had to set us all free.
Mary jabbed a little finger in my cheek. ‘F …’ she tried. ‘Fer. Fankee.’
‘Frankie?’ I said experimentally.
She nodded and stuck her thumb in her mouth, her eyes swimmy with comfort.
‘Yeah,’ I said softly. ‘That’s me.’
Frankie. It sounded good. It felt like home.
I’m Frankie, and the only person I belong to is me.
‘Come on then, Mary,’ I said. ‘Let’s go make some trouble.’
HE WAS IN the office, staring into space, looking completely lost. I felt suddenly shy, overwhelmed, at the sight of him. There’s so much to say. Things I should have said earlier.
At the sight of us, he sat up and rearranged his face.
‘Everything all right? Why are you carrying the little girl? That’s not like you. I mean—’
‘It’s okay. I know. And her name’s Mary.’
‘Oh,’ he said slowly. ‘That’s a nice name. What are you doing up? Is the rain getting in through the roof, or something? I told Crawler we needed to fix that …’
‘No. The roof’s fine.’ I bit my lip. ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’
Speaking and thinking was getting harder by the second.
In the end, I just blurted out: ‘Oh, please don’t take the poison.’
Scanlon shuffled some papers around on the desk busily. His face went tight and still.
‘It’s fine. I’m actually fine about it—’
‘But you shouldn’t be fine about it! You’re making a massive mistake!’
Finally, he met my eyes, and his glare was frightening, because it was the look of someone who had made up his mind. ‘Am I? The more I think about it, the more I realise it’s perfect for me.’
‘How can you say that?’ I gasped.
‘Look, I haven’t had the life you had.’ He sounded exhausted. ‘And I know you had a wonderful, loving family, but not all are like that. So it’s sweet of you to care, but you don’t have to. I won’t miss anything, I won’t miss my happy life, because I never had it to begin with.’
For a terrible, empty second, I wondered if he was right. And then a beautiful word popped into my mind.
‘Fudge,’ I blurted out. It felt so right I said it again, like a prayer. ‘Fudge. Proper, crumbly, melt-in-your-mouth fudge. From Devon. Have you ever had that type of fudge?’
He gave me a quizzical look. ‘Er, no. I can’t say I have.’
‘Right. There you go then. You can’t die till you taste that. You literally can’t – it’s a rule of the universe. I’m surprised you didn’t know that – all babies get told that in the womb. You must have not been listening. Anyway, that’s the rule, so there you go. Also …’ my words began to come more easily now, ‘dog’s ears.
