“The Writing Life,” I said.

“Check out the back cover.”

I turned it over, scanning the details.

“It’s a short story competition,” Jenny said. “Open to anybody under the age of eighteen. If you get selected, there’s going to be an anthology of the winners—an actual book. The deadline’s not far off.”

“Okay.”

I looked at the advertisement, not understanding.

Finally, it clicked.

“What—you think I should enter it?”

“Yeah! Definitely. I thought your story was really good. You should absolutely send it in.”

“Are you going to send yours?”

“Of course. I mean, what’s to lose?”

I stared down at the magazine for a few seconds, reading through the details again, more carefully this time. Crucially, there was no fee to enter. So what harm would it do? I was worried about getting rejected, of course, but Jenny thought my story was good enough.

“I’ve not got a pen.”

She rolled her eyes. “You don’t need to send it off now.”

“I know that. I mean to write down the address.”

“It’s fine—take the magazine. I’ve already got the details.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, totally.” She shook her head at me, bemused. “That’s why I brought it in.”

That’s why I brought it in.

I remember being excited by that. It meant that, despite the small number of times we’d interacted, Jenny had been thinking about me, and that knowledge delivered a thrill that was difficult to describe. A warmth in my stomach. I hadn’t experienced anything like it before, but it was as though I’d just learned the world contained possibilities I hadn’t known about.

I put the magazine into my bag. “Thank you.”

“That’s okay,” Jenny said. “No big deal.”

* * *

The next morning, I was yawning as I walked through the town, meandering to James’s house almost on autopilot. The cold helped wake me up a little, at least—even though spring had officially come, Gritten seemed to hang on to its winters as hard as it did to its people. But in the town the grass was growing again, at least, and while the sun was little more than a shimmery coin occluded by clouds right then, I could feel it gathering strength. There was birdsong for what felt like the first time in months. A cautious sound that seemed not to want to tempt fate, but there.

My heart sank as I arrived at James’s house.

It was normally Carl who got him ready for school and saw him off on a morning, but that day Eileen was outside on the doorstep. She was wearing a faded dressing gown, and she was wiping at the door with an old blue rag bunched up in her fist, a look of angry concentration on her face.

The gate hung on one old hinge. The wood scratched along the ground as I opened it. Eileen looked over at me sharply, and I kept my head down as I made my way up the path.

“Good morning, Mrs. Dawson.”

“Is it?”

She resumed her activity, holding the door with one hand and pressing the cloth against it with the other, wiping with such ferocity that I half expected the flimsy wood to give. She shouted into the house.

“Get out here, boy. It’s schooltime.”

There was no immediate response. I stood there awkwardly for a few moments, watching her work. There was a bottle of disinfectant at her feet.

“Anything happen at yours last night?” she said.

The question threw me; I had no idea what she meant. After a second, perhaps taking my silence for some kind of guilt, she looked at me suspiciously.

“Were you out last night?”

“Mrs. Dawson?”

“Don’t gape at me like that, boy. Were you out last night?”

“No.”

She stared at me, evaluating me. After what felt like an eternity, she shook her head and then turned her attention back to the door.

“Someone was. One of you lot out playing silly fuckers.”

Before I could say anything else, James appeared in the doorway, edging past his mother carefully, as though the woman were electric and might give him a shock if they touched.

“See you later, Dad,” he called back into the house. “Love you.”

Carl’s voice came from somewhere far away inside the house. “Love you too.”

I waited until James and I had walked out of earshot.

“Everything all right?”

“Yeah.”

Which was obviously a lie, but I didn’t want to press the matter. When the bus arrived, he got on first. I always led the two of us up to the back—because that felt like the place you were meant to sit at our age—but today James took us to a spare seat in the middle. When the doors shut and the bus started off, we sat there in silence for a time. But while I didn’t want to ask James outright what had happened, I was still curious about what Eileen had said.

Anything happen at yours last night?

“What was your mother doing?” I said.

“Cleaning the door.”

“Yeah, I saw that. What I mean is, why?”

James hesitated.

“Did you hear anything?” he said. “In the night?”

I thought about it again. As far as I could recall I’d slept through undisturbed.

“Not that I remember.”

“Are you sure?”

James looked as tired as I was. But scared too.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What am I supposed to have heard?”

But after a moment, James turned away and looked out of the window at the bleak landscape flashing past.

“Nothing.”

“Yeah. It really sounds like nothing.”

“Someone knocking at the door. Did you hear that?”

“Knocking? No.”

“Right.”

“You mean, you did?”

“No, it’s just what my mother said. Someone was hammering at our door in the middle of the night. She was pissed off about it because it woke her up.” James shrugged, a small, timid gesture that was barely even completed. “So she woke me and Dad up too. There was nobody there, though. I thought maybe she imagined it, except there was something on the door this morning. That was what she was doing—cleaning it off.”

“Cleaning what off?”

Again, James didn’t reply. I wondered if he actually knew—or if there had even been anything there at all. Eileen drank a lot, and she wasn’t the type of person to admit she’d gotten something wrong. It was easy to believe she’d imagined a noise in the night, overreacted, and had just been cleaning the door this morning as a way of stubbornly pretending she was right.

The bus turned off the main road and began making its way past the abandoned factories, run-down shops, and boarded-up houses.

James said something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch.

“What?” I said.

“Blood.”

He was still watching the dull scenery, his voice so quiet I could barely hear him.

“She said there was blood on our door.”

FIFTEEN

NOW

Officer Owen Holder squinted at my mother’s front door.