Chapter 4

She had heard her father weeping. Kate was supposed to be sleeping, but she could hear him on the other side of the wall-too close,as if the bricks and plaster had dissolved in his tears. What

were you doing in the water?'he cried.

What were you thinking of? 'Kate heard her mother's voice murmured-no words, just something soft. What was her mother thinking? Kate didn't know. When she fell asleep, at last, she dreamt that her mother was porcelain white, standing at the top of the high stairs in her uncle's house, and then Kate watched her fall down the stairs did she fall, or jump, or was she pushed? - and at the bottom, her mother was cracked; not crumpled, but broken; her face was broken into jagged pieces, all separated now, no blood, no flesh, just broken China.And when Kate tried to speak to scream - no sound came out, her throat closed up,and she was silent, like her broken mother.

In the morning, after the dream, her uncle's brother, Luke, came to the flat and Kate said goodbye to her parents.

Luke lived in London, but Kate didn't know him very well. He was younger than Charles and had no children of his own; he looked at Kate as if she might bite, or was he looking at her father? Her father wasn't looking at anyone; he was just sitting in the corner, staring at the floor, rocking himself, making a low moaning sound that frightened Kate.

she got into the back seat of Luke's car and her throat was hurting like it had done in the dream, burning, tight, but she wasn't dreaming. This was real, though the world looked different through the rear window as she waved to her mother; wrong, somehow, as if she had slipped through the crack in the willow-pattern plate,to a skewed and shifting place.

Luke drove her to the house. The house was called Elverson House. That was its address: Elverson House ,Elverson, Norofolk ,England,Great Britain, the world, the Universe, Infinity. Julian told her that .She wrote it in the red writing book that her mother had given her for the summer holidays. Then she wrote her name on the next line, as nearly as she could, to avoid the possibility of mistakes (not like last year, when she'd got confused, mixed some letters up the wrong way round).Kate Linden. Aged seven.