I thought he might just wave and walk on. But he didn’t. He crossed the road and came to stand with me.

‘Well, hello,’ he said. He had his hands in his pockets and kind of rocked backwards on his heels. It made him look like a teacher for some reason and I had that really eww feeling you get when you see a teacher out of school, like they’re naked or something. But at the same time I felt really pleased to see him.

I said, ‘Hi,’ and wondered what I looked like to him. I was wearing false eyelashes that day; this was early 2016 – everyone was wearing false eyelashes. I didn’t think I looked stupid at the time but I probably did.

‘Finished school?’ he said.

‘Yeah. Just heading home.’ As I said this, I looked up at the tower, to the eighth floor. I always recognised my floor from the ground because of the ugly red and green striped curtains in the window of flat thirty-five next door. It was like a marker.

‘Up there?’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Up there.’

‘Nice views, I bet?’

I shrugged. I’d happily forsake the views for a home with more rooms in it.

‘So, our next appointment …?’

‘Wednesday,’ I said.

‘Five thirty p.m.?’

‘Yep.’

‘See you then.’

‘Yeah. See you then.’

I headed towards the entrance to the block. I turned around as I pulled the door open, because for some reason I expected Roan to still be standing there, to be watching me. But he wasn’t. He was gone.

Roan and his family moved to a flat near the Portman Centre January last year. How do I know this? Because I saw them, literally on the day they moved in. I was walking to the village, up those big roads that go up the hill from my estate, those roads of mansions and Teslas and electronic gates.

And there was this van double-parked with hazards flashing and some young guys unloading boxes and lamps and chairs and whatnot. The door to the house was wide open, and I always like to look inside an open door, and I saw a woman; she was thin and wearing jeans and a pink jumper and trainers. Her hair was blonde and fine and shoulder-length. And there was a boy, a teenager, and they were carrying things through a door at the end of the hallway, and then a man appeared coming the other way and it was him. It was Roan. He was wearing a hoodie and jeans. He went to the back of the van and was saying something to one of the guys inside the van and I almost walked on but I suddenly had this urge to let him know I’d seen him. I was about to cross over the street and say hello when the woman in the pink jumper appeared. I didn’t know she was his wife then, but I assumed she must be.

They said something to each other and then both disappeared inside the van and I caught my breath and carried on my way.

But before I carried on walking, my eye took in the number on their front door: seventeen.

I never told Roan I’d seen him move into his new home. We didn’t talk about stuff like that. I’d never even really thought about where he might live or what his life might be like outside our room at the Portman. When we had our next session, about four days after I saw him moving house, we just went straight down to business as usual. He didn’t tell me he’d moved and I didn’t tell him I knew.

Then about two weeks later, Roan said that he thought we were ready to start thinking about terminating our therapy. He said this as though I should be pleased, as though I’d actually quite like to finish therapy, as if it was school or swimming lessons or something. He said he thought another two or three sessions should ‘bring us to where we need to be’.

Strange, you know, because I’m not stupid but I’d been stupid enough to think that therapy would just keep on and on until I was ready to stop. Or maybe, you know, forever.

‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘How do you know where we need to be?’

He smiled, that weird, lazy smile of his, like he’s not bothered but then thinks, Fuck it. ‘That’s my job, Saffyre.’

‘Yeah, but don’t I have some say?’

‘Of course you do. Of course. What would your say be?’

I had to stop then and really think about my answer, because I didn’t exactly know what I wanted. On a fundamental level I wanted the weekly punctuation marks of an hour in Roan’s room; the familiarity of the suspended ceiling with the three halogen lights, one sickly yellow, two bright white; the double-glazed window with the view of a snapped branch on a tree that swung back and forth on winter nights when the wind blew, cutting shadows through the sodium glow of a street light beyond; the two red chairs with the nubby fabric; the low wooden table with the tissues and the little white lamp; the brown carpet with the crusty white patch near the foot of the armchair; the muted sounds of people walking past the door. I wanted to carry on seeing Roan’s feet every week, in leather lace-up shoes, in his peng white trainers, in nasty strappy Velcro sandals, in snow boots. I wanted to hear his low, measured voice asking me questions, the slight clear of his throat as he waited for me to answer. And then after the session, I wanted to walk past the drama school, past the Tube, past the farmers’ market, past the theatre, feel the seasons changing in the textures beneath my feet: slippery wet leaves, hot paving stones, slimy snow, dirty puddles, whatever; all the months and months and now years and years of Roan Fours, how could it end? It was like telling me that day and night would no longer exist, that there would no longer be twenty-four hours in a day. It was that fundamental.

Eventually I said, ‘My say would be that I don’t think I’m ready.’

‘In which ways, would you say, are you not ready?’

I shrugged. I said some bullshit about still thinking about hurting myself when I hadn’t thought about hurting myself for over a year.

He gave me a look, calling me on my bullshit with his eyes. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’re looking at another two or three weeks yet. I’ll get the process in motion. We can always double back on it closer to the time if you still feel we need to. But genuinely I don’t think you’re going to feel the need to. You’re amazing, Saffyre. The work we’ve done is incredible. You should be pleased.’

I still hadn’t told him about the bad thing that happened to me when I was in year five. I wanted to say that to him, to shut him up. I wanted to say someone did something unbearable to me when I was ten years old and you’ve been talking to me non-stop for more than three years and you still don’t know that so how can you say I should be pleased? I wanted to say you’re a shit psychologist. I wanted to say all sorts of things. But I didn’t. I just left.

Roan Fours signed me off three weeks later.

He tried to make a big, happy moment of it.

I pretended it was OK.

But it was not OK.

It was far from OK.

11

Did I tell you that I am a trained killer? That I’m a ninja warrior?

Well, I’m not really. But I am a black belt in taekwondo. There’s a martial-arts school just over the road from me, in the sports centre. It’s what’s known in the trade as a dojo and I’ve been going there since I was about six years old. So you’d think I’d have been able to defend myself from a puny Year Six boy with wandering hands and a sick mentality. But no, I was pathetic, let it happen, and then punished my own self for it for years afterwards while Harrison John got to swan off to secondary school without a backward glance.

He would have said that I enjoyed it, because I was so passive. But I didn’t.

At taekwondo classes every week I kick and grunt and sweat, pretending every blow is on Harrison’s head. I picture the walls splattered with his blood, bits of his tiny pea brain, fragments of his skull.

But at school, when I was a small child, I just let it happen.

I let it happen three times.

I still go to taekwondo once a week; it’s just habit really, but my skills have come in very useful the past few months. I’m not a small person, I’m five feet eight and when my hair is loose, I look even taller. I take up space in the world. People see me. But I can move light on my feet, I really can. I can move about like a shadow if I need to. I pull up my hoodie, keep my chin down, eyes up. I reckon I could walk past my own uncle on the street and he wouldn’t see me, if I put my mind to it.

The first week that went by without me having a session with Roan was OK. I’d missed the occasional session before if I’d been ill, or he’d been on holiday or whatever. It was when the third week loomed up that I suddenly felt this cold drip in the pit of my stomach, like icy water. I imagined Roan sitting in our room, on our nubby chairs, with some other kid, some kid with stupid annoying issues, and he’d have to pretend to be as interested in theirs as he was in mine.