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ran away from the Castle. He said he hated it. The nurse said hate was not a good emotion, especially in a growing boy.
    His father had not arrived so they sat in the outer hall and waited and waited, but he never came. Two more phone calls were made, and then a nurse and a doctor came out and had a piece of paper that was a dossier on him. The man and the woman stood with them and he was standing nearby, next to a big green plant, and he could hear what they were saying. The doctor was telling the woman that it was not advisable to have him around other children.
    ‘Why not . . . why not?’ she kept asking. He held up the dossier again and showed it to the husband and the husband said ‘Jesus’ and said he would rather not show it to his wife. The doctor insisted. He held up the piece of paper for the woman to see, and when she saw it she screamed and said it out loud for everyone to hear - This boy could kill.
    The man and his wife shook their heads at one another and then the man came across to him and said that there was no room at the inn and that they would be taking him back to the Castle.
    ‘Don’t send me back, don’t send me back.’ He got down on his knees and shouted it to strangers sitting in armchairs. It was visiting Sunday. A woman came forward with a biscuit and he refused it and shouted louder, louder, ‘Don’t send me back there . .. I’ll do away with myself.’
    He said it to himself when they drove through the night in the rain. He thought if he said it often enough that his prayer would be answered, but it was not. They drove along dark country roads, where there were hardly any cars, and now and then came on a dead fox or a dead cat, outstretched, its fur and its guts strewn there, a pitifulness to it, as if there was something that cat or that fox badly needed to say.

Eily Ryan
    I would come here for the mornings alone. Everything fresh, sparkling, the fields washed after rain, the whole world washed. Daisies and clover and blue borage springing up, and the young cattle on the other side of the fence, frisking, kicking their hind legs and their tails, as if they have taken leave of their senses. The apple and crab-apple trees are coming into flower, apparitions of white, cloaked in green.
    I went up the lane very early to give an eye to the ewes in Dessie’s field, like I promised him I would. They are due to lamb. There was a fox padding over the far field, out for its breakfast, and I wondered what I would do if it attacked the ewes. First it drank out of the stream and then crossed over, lifting its leg every other minute, and came at a trot to where I was. Its pupils are vertical like a cat’s. It’s the nearest I have ever been to a fox. A big heavy ewe was cropping the grass and it stole up to her like it was invisible. It was sniffing, sniffing, when our Smokey came and charged it and chased it back over the stream and up the opposite hill, the pair of them ferocious, a chestnut coat and a grey coat savaging one another, then the fox vanishing into a burrow, and Smokey coming back frothing.
    The nights can be long. My sister, Cassandra, says we won’t stick it in the winter, Maddie and me. We’ll have coughs and colds. We will stick it. We’ll wear loads of jumpers and thick socks, and anyhow we have the summer to acclimatise. I leave the door open for the clean, fresh smells to come in. The house has had no one in it for years, so it smells mouldy, a reek of lime and damp mortar. Apple Tree House it was named.
    Up in Denny’s pub they said that a cobbler lived here once and most likely I will come upon odd shoes. I did find a bracelet in an old coal scuttle where someone must have hidden it. It polished up nicely. And I have Maddie gabbling away nonstop. He says the daftest things. He says this house is ‘yucky’ and that we should go back to the ‘apportments’. That is his new big word. I say, ‘Wait until we have a bathroom and a tiled stove and a birdcage and a