By the time I was fourteen, I was well done with the entire facade. I had started by then at Roedean and—with good reason—my dorm mate* was uncomfortable with my tendency to leave the windows unlocked at nighttime. That aside, I was past the age of bedtime stories, and I was tired of the fairy tales. The mystical boy I’d been told my entire life was truth had morphed into myth, though Nanna Wendy and Grandma Mary still swore up and down and inside out that he was real and on his way to find me from some corner in the universe.
The truth is I don’t need him to come and find me anymore.
It’s 1967, and I’m seventeen （soon to be eighteen） years old. I don’t want to spend my summer with a strange thirteen-year-old boy. Aside from the concept of the aforementioned residing within a status of questionable legality, it also just happens to sound rather terrible. I’ve far more pressing matters on my mind than an imaginary boy who crows at himself and all the things he does.
This summer is all that’s standing between myself and the start of my real life.
I was always young for my year at school. My mother enrolled me early. She said once it was because I was smart, but I think it was because she wanted to be in Belize. But it’s worked rather well for me because I’m quite ready to grow up. I’ve been a grown-up all my life, I think. I’ve had to be.
The most responsible adult I know is obsessed entirely with ninth century Mesoamerica, and my grandmothers are completely off with the fairies,* though not literally （much to their dismay）。
They are lovely though. Please don’t for a second think that they aren’t.
Wendy and Mary are my favourite people in the world, bereft of reality though they may be.
It makes them both sad—Wendy especially, I can tell—that he’s forgotten me. “He forgets things sometimes, see?” she’d say with a grimace, as though that makes it sting less. That I’m either forgettable or raised by lunatics.
They are, at least, profiteering lunatics. Wendy wrote and illustrated all her stories into a great big one; you’ve probably read it. She wrote it under a man’s name because it’s a man’s world. More so then than now, maybe.
The sexual revolution is upon us （or so they tell us）， but I’m not vastly interested in sex as it is. I’m interested in intelligence and the pursuit of it.
I like geology. That’s strange, my friend told me. It’s a weird thing to like. But I like this planet. I’m happy to be on it, happy to be grounded by it. It’s beautiful here, so why wouldn’t I be? I don’t need a silly star with mermaids on it. I’ve got this one, with all its strange and peculiar variants of life busting out all over. Manatees and hummingbirds and fireflies. What a world.
Another thing on this planet that I love? Cambridge. And I got in. I start in the autumn. I made Wendy lie on tables in the library with me while no one was looking and breathe in the wisdom of those who’d gone before me, and I felt for the billionth time in my life a great urgency to learn absolutely everything I can, to know it all. Sometimes Mary says she can see it on me, ageing me, all the knowledge I try to get growing me up, but then Wendy’s always said it’s strange how love can undo you. Time unravels in its presence, she says. It pierces the veil of our understanding.
It’s not an overly spectacular night. Quite regular, actually.
Brisk, even.
The air’s cool, our street in our little corner of Chelsea by the park is, as usual, blissfully quiet, and the sky is all clear, peppered with stars that, upon closer inspection, were perhaps unusually bright.?
And it is on this night of no great or particular significance that my story really begins.
You know how you grow accustomed to the sounds of your own home?
With the exception of my time away from school, I’ve lived at number 14 all my life. It’s the house my mother grew up in, and hers—the Darling home?—three generations. I know the sounds of my house in the depths of me—blood memories, maybe. Embedded in my DNA.
I suppose it’s important to pause here and let you know that there was a constant and unspoken battle that raged within the walls of my bedroom: one of windows up and windows down.
The unlatching I could deal with. As I mentioned before, at my grandmothers’ insistence, my bedroom windows were always unlatched,§ despite exponentially rising crime in this city. And who was I to argue with them? They wanted to see me mauled to death by a gang of youths who scaled the wall of a Chelsea home looking for an easy window to open and climb through for drug money? That’s fine. My death could be their burden to bear. Less fine by me, however, was the flagrant invitation for trouble by leaving said window flung wide open.