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Typical me to get tied up in a situation like this.

“I want you to know, for your information, that you can't marry her.”

And he went, “Why not?” and I went, “Well, for one thing, you're only a kid,” and he said, “No, I'm not. I'm sixteen, and that's a very good age for people to start thinking about their future.”

I told him that as far as I was concerned, thinking about the future was fantastically overrated.

“Look, how many girls have you actually met in your life?”

He admitted that he hadn't met very many, and I said, “See? See? How can you possibly know that she's the one if you haven't had a proper look around? There might be billions of other girls in a whole load of other places who could be perfect for you.”

And it was around then that I realized that even if your life is rubbish, the idea of not being born . . . Well, let's just say I didn't think it was a particularly good option.

“Okay, anyway, listen,” I said. “I've changed my mind, and the thing is that we can't bring her to Blackbrick. We need to take her back to her house. Because I know for a fact that she's
not
your future. Everything's going to get screwed up if you marry her, and I'm not going to let that happen.”

I stood facing him, trying to make myself into somebody that he wasn't going to argue with. But it didn't work. He had this big, annoyed look on his face.

“Right. Hold on a moment now. Who are you to be telling me my business? What suddenly makes you such a know-it-all about the things that I should and shouldn't do and about decisions that have got nothing to do with you? Get back up into the cart and get moving,” he growled. He was pointing ahead and acting like I was his personal slave.

“No, I won't,” I said.

“Well, grand,” he said, “because it doesn't make any difference to me. I'll be just as happy to leave you here.”

“Well, if you do that, then I'll go back and tell her parents the truth. I'll tell them, Lord Corporamore doesn't know anything about this whole creepy, dodgy arrangement.”

I definitely wasn't ready for what he did next.

He snatched my shirt and started to swing me around. I tried not to let him, but it turns out he was very strong. Then he dragged me onto the ground.

He curled his hand into a knobbly fist and he punched me in the face, and I could feel a dead prickly burn, which was the beginning of a massive purple swelling that ended up staying on my face for a good while afterward.

I was lying on the ground then, and he had his foot on my chest and was pointing his toe at my chin, and he was going on about how his will was greater than mine.

“Why are you threatening to scupper me? I'm the one
who let you stay. I should have told you to go back to wherever you bloody well came from as soon as I first saw you. And you know I can still get rid of you now. All I have to do is tell Corporamore you're here, scribbling things down in that notebook and not having any proof of identity and suchlike.”

I spoke to him as clearly as I was able to, even though by then I felt extremely dizzy.

“Listen to me for a second, Kevin. Will you please listen? I know things that you don't know and I'm from a place that none of you has been, and I need you to trust me. Maggie's not supposed to be your destiny and you're not supposed to be hers, and if you do become each other's destinies, then a load of people will be in trouble, including me.”

“What kind of trouble are you talking about?” he asked, all out of breath.

“Nonexistence trouble. My life is probably hanging in the balance as we speak.”

He looked at me as if I was the saddest person he'd met in his entire life.

“It's hard to explain. And I know it sounds weird and everything. But I need you to believe me. Please.”

My voice got smaller and smaller. Suddenly I felt kind of humiliated. I think it was because of the way he was looking at me, and how extremely weird he obviously thought I was. I could feel myself sort of slumping down as if the air had been let out of me. I was scared that I was in the middle
of wiping out my own future, but as well as that, I was disappointed. If you've been all geared up to meet the young version of your gran and then you realize that in fact you've collected someone who isn't actually her, that's disappointing in its own strange way.

“And all
I
need
you
to do is listen carefully to
me
. Because this is the last time I'm telling you: Maggie McGuire is coming with us to Blackbrick. Nothing's going to stop that from happening. Do you understand? If you're still planning to thwart me, then I will do you another injury, and this time you might never recover from it. But I don't think you really want to thwart me, do you?”

If I'd known what “thwart” actually meant, I might have been in a better position to comment.

He took his foot off my chest, and I sat up.

By then Maggie had climbed off the cart.

“Kevin? God almighty. What in heaven's name are you doing to Lord Corporamore's poor nephew?”

They stood quite close to me, but for a while I couldn't get up off the ground. I grabbed clumps of mud out of the earth and kind of threw them so they scattered off in a load of different directions.

After that he didn't say another single mean thing to me. He waited for a bit until I calmed down.

“All right, easy there,” he said. “You are being a terrible nuisance, but all the same I don't like to see anyone so grieved.”

I felt like telling him if he didn't like it, he shouldn't have given me that punch in the head.

“Kevin, what's happened to you? What on earth . . .? This boy doesn't wish us any ill. He's helping us. Aren't you, Cyril?” She looked at me and smiled one of her fantastic smiles.

I wondered if he really did feel bad, or whether he was just trying to impress his girlfriend.

“I didn't mean to be so rough with you,” he said quite softly then. “But you see, I'm not letting anyone come between me and Maggie, and the fellow who threatens to do that will make me furious. That's my position on the matter. I'm not apologizing for it, though I do admit to having gotten a bit carried away there. Now I'm going to ask you this one question, and the question is: Are you still going to help us?”

I rolled over on the cold ground and I pushed myself up onto my feet and staggered around for a bit.

I know it's a pretty unlikely thing to happen, but in case you ever meet your granddad when he's young, don't be too aggressive to him, not even if you've been provoked.

“Okay, okay. I'll still help,” I said, even though something inside my brain felt like it was sinking into the quicksand of time.

So then we were up on the cart again, and Maggie laughed a little bit and said, “Well, goodness me. I'm very glad we got that sorted out.”

And that's how Kevin's plan to bring her to Blackbrick was suddenly back in the middle of happening, and the horses were trotting up the north avenue, and I knew then that if I was going to have any chance of existing in the future, I was going to have to figure out a plan of my own, and I was going to have to do it quite soon.

By then my young granddad didn't seem to care about anything apart from her. They kept looking at each other without blinking, until eventually I had to say, “Guys, delighted you're so happy to see each other and everything, but would you mind waiting until we get back to the stables for this, because I'm the one who has to steer the cart, and I kind of need to be able to concentrate.”

It was obvious that both of them were totally on the love train. And the problem is that love like that can be a very difficult thing to reverse.

Chapter 10

IT'S NOT like I didn't know how bizarre the whole thing was—meeting my granddad when he was a kid, and then meeting this lovely strange girl who wasn't my grandmother but whom he worshipped, and helping to get the two of them together—and realizing that if I actually wanted a chance of existing, then getting him together with someone who wasn't my gran was not in my best interests, to put it mildly. It sounds completely mad, I know, and I wouldn't have believed it myself—that's if it hadn't happened. There might be people who could reckon that I was having one massive big hallucination because maybe I was mad myself. But just because you can't explain something scientifically doesn't mean it's been invented by the murky recesses of your own sad little brain. Weird things happen. That's the thing about being alive: it's totally weird.

I had no idea what the plan was when we got back, but it turns out that Kevin had a good few of the practicalities already taken care of. He'd been organizing them for ages, apparently.

There was this whole big bit of Blackbrick that nobody ever went to anymore. It was called Crispin's wing, and it's where we took Maggie. She had started to get suspicious—obviously, because she wasn't stupid—asking why were we creeping around like that, but Kevin kept telling her to trust him, and she kept saying
of course
she trusted him, and he said, “No more questions, then—not until we get everything settled.”

We walked along a brown shiny corridor. To the right at the end of it, there was a thick door scarred with deep cracks, like old wounds. Kevin pushed it open. On the other side was a cold room, very dusty, with wind coming in gushes down a big stained fireplace. There were brushes and cloths and a bucket stacked in the grate. It looked as if someone had once been in the middle of cleaning it but had given up for some sudden reason. Kevin weaved across the room, past saggy armchairs and sofa-shaped objects, which were all covered in blotchy gray sheets. There was another door, and behind it was a much comfier type of a place, with a wide, clean bed and warm-looking blankets. A proper fire must have been lit earlier in the day. It was dying down now but was still smoldering in its grate, and breathing out little occasional glows of brightness. A fat candle glimmered on a low table. There was a huge bookshelf that went up to the ceiling. All of the shelves dipped in gentle curves, weighed down by heavy hardbacks. There was a mirror and a comfortable-looking chair. I thought
about my own small, cold room and my flat mattress for a jealous second or two.

She kept saying how perfectly lovely it all was and that she felt like a queen and how comfortable the bed looked, and I said, “Yeah, it totally does.”

“Will you be all right here for a while?” Kevin asked. And she said, “Oh, indeed I will.” Then he said we had to go, or else Mrs. Kelly'd be wondering where we were. As we moved toward the door, he held out his hand to me and we did a handshake.

“Thanks, Cosmo.”

“Cosmo?” said Maggie from the bed. “I thought his name was Cyril.”

Kevin told her to get some sleep and that very soon he'd explain everything properly. We had to leave her there and get back to the main part of the Abbey.

“I really am grateful to you for helping us the way you did. I couldn't have done it without you,” said Kevin. And even though I knew there was a serious risk that I'd more or less secured my own future annihilation that night, still there was a part of me that felt quite good.

Chapter 11