Advent Read Free Page A

other unspoken issue involving mysterious unhappiness and blame. He knew from experience that if he made the wrong guess as to what the real subject was, she’d either start crying or send him off in that particular way that made him feel like he’d done something horrible.
      ‘I just think you’re too old now to spend so much time playing a game like that.’
      He got it in a flash. He was supposed to become a different person. She wanted him to get more excited about carpets and newspapers and money. She wanted him to be more like Dad. She was telling him to ‘grow up’.
      ‘So, can you try not to talk about her any more? All right? Gavin? Would it help if we wrote her a goodbye letter? Perhaps we can think of all the adventures she’s going to have now. Places she can go instead. She might like not being stuck in London.’
      He nodded, because silent agreement was the best way to end the serious conversations as quickly as possible, but secretly he thought this whole plan ridiculous. Miss Grey wasn’t at all the type to go on adventures. She wasn’t like someone in a book.
      ‘You’re not going away, are you?’ he asked her, the next time he saw her. They were standing on the railway footbridge he crossed on his way back from school, in a sullen drizzle. She looked at him with her almost-sad face and held her hands out, cupped, gathering a puddle of rainwater. She bent and blew gently on the water, then opened her hands a fraction, letting it trickle away onto the tracks.
      ‘Please don’t,’ he said, feeling sick. ‘Please don’t leave me with Mum and Dad.’
      She made the cup again, but this time held it up over his head. He leaned back to see what she was doing and flinched as she dribbled the rain over his mouth. When he licked his lips there was a dark taste, a lonely taste, but despite that he was reassured. Though she never said a word except in dreams, he understood what she meant most of the time, like he understood some other things that didn’t speak, and he knew that she was promising he wouldn’t have to ‘grow up’ at home without her, even if the darkness and loneliness were coming.
      Unfortunately the growing-up happened all by itself, whether he liked it or (as was the case) not.
      As the months and years went by, Gavin stopped pleading with her not to leave him. He stopped speaking to her at all. He stayed away from the empty quiet corners, the lanes behind back-garden fences and the mud and scrub of the towpath along the river, those untended nooks and crannies of the city where the things that weren’t supposed to happen most often seemed to happen. He was learning, rapidly, that they weren’t just against his parents’ rules, but broke some other set of rules as well, some huge body of law that didn’t only apply at home but was mysteriously in place everywhere else too: school, on holiday, parties, anywhere that people gathered. He had a feeling the regulations would have been relaxed if Auntie Gwen had been around, but Auntie Gwen never came to stay any more, because, he gradually discovered, she wasn’t invited. Perhaps she was as illegal as Miss Grey. He couldn’t guess. No one ever explained the system to him.
      The imaginary-friend idea had to be discarded. Apparently that was just a silly thing little kids did, on a level with Mum’s stupid idea about writing Miss Grey a letter. What was she, then? A ghost? Boys at school talked about ghosts. There were stories about them, lots of them: he read all the ones he could find. None of the things in the stories sounded anything like Miss Grey.
      ‘How do you know ghosts don’t exist?’ he asked one evening at dinner.
      His father put his glass down and went very still. Gav had thought he was being clever, finding a way to talk about Miss Grey without actually mentioning her, but it was immediately evident that Dad had sussed him out, and Mum knew it too. The funny crackle appeared in the air