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Part of me was proud. The letters were perfectly formed and only a few of the words were spelled incorrectly, and there was nothing wrong with the grammar at all. But still, even though it was a well-written note, it was one of the worst things that I've ever read on a piece of paper of any kind:

Dear Kevin and Cosmo, I am leveing this house today, and I do not think that I will be back. I wish I could stay here with you both, but I cannot so I'm afrade there you have it. Thank you for your frendship and your kindness. I will never forget it as
long as I live. Please don't try to find me. I must leve and I beg you not to folow.

I don't know if you've ever looked for someone and they're not there. It's a lousy feeling. Your skin goes all sweaty and you keep going back to places that you've been before, kind of knowing that you're not going to find them but looking, searching, looking all the same, and your heart starts to go really fast, and you can't think about anything else, and you begin to think that you'd do anything at all that you possibly could to find the person you are looking for. I remembered the way my mum had told me she was going to Australia, and how I hadn't said a word, how I'd pretended I didn't even care. I should have told her the truth: I should have said that it was definitely not okay for her to leave me like that, that I needed her to stay with me.

I wasn't going to make that stupid mistake again—not this time, not with Maggie.

I started calling her name and then shouting it, and then eventually I screamed, “MAGGIE, MAGGIE, MAGGIE,” over and over again as if I was practically insane.

Eventually Kevin said it was no good. That we'd have to go to bed and start looking for her again in the morning. I said, “Are you seriously telling me that you're going to be able to sleep?” And he said probably not but we'd better try because there was no point in the two of us being totally wrecked on top of everything else.

I pretended to go to bed. But as soon as Kevin said good night and closed his door, I went straight out again.

My hands and my legs were shaking when I swung onto Ross that night, and we galloped, trying to break the sound barrier, feeling as if we were going faster than any human being and horse had ever gone before, so that we could find Maggie.

I wasn't going to give up. I didn't think I ever would. I was sure she needed help. It was only after we'd trampled almost everywhere else on the estate that I thought about the gate lodge. It was one of those moments that you have in life when you ask yourself why you hadn't thought of something sooner.

By the time we got there, Ross and I were dog-tired, but we didn't care that much about ourselves. I tried to open the front door, but it was locked from the inside.

There were a few long, thinnish wooden logs lined up in a sort of pyramid shape alongside the house. I picked one of them up. It was hard to keep my balance, so I staggered around for a bit.

I held the log as steadily as I could and then I ran, roaring, toward the door.

The house was creaky and damp, but someone had tried their best to clean it up. There were broken old chairs propped against the walls, and someone had put wildflowers into a chipped cup that was sitting on a table. I heard a noise in the next room.

It was her. She was there. Which just goes to show, you should listen to your gut instincts every so often.

She was lying on a mattress on the floor. And for a moment I didn't notice anything else except her face, but then there was this little bleating, grumbly sound and I looked among the ragged blankets that she was surrounded by, and that's when I saw the baby, all tiny and squirmy and pink.

“Maggie,” I said, moving closer to where she was lying. “Maggie, why didn't you ever
say
anything?”

And then the little baby's eyes looked straight into mine without question or judgment or fear. I kept on looking at the way her mouth moved and how her fingers jerked and her eyes flickered open and closed and her legs stretched out and how little puffs of newborn breath went in and out of her extremely small nose.

I even held her for a little while in my own arms.

Her miniature hands kept opening and closing as if she was trying to cast a spell on the world. Some people say that newborn babies can't see much, but when I held my finger in front of her, she looked straight at it. And when I opened and closed my mouth like a goldfish, she copied me. I swear. Check it out on the Internet. Newborn babies do actually do that. They have this inbuilt ability to copy the people they see around them in quite sophisticated ways almost as soon as they are born. And they're designed to survive.

So even though you might be very worried about how small they look, they have a great instinct for protecting
themselves. Apparently if you put their hands against the branch of a tree, they'll cling on really tight and dangle there, hanging on and not falling. I didn't try that, though. To be honest, I wouldn't really recommend trying that with any new babies you happen to know.

The whole time Maggie kept looking at this tiny new person in a totally special, kind, fierce sort of a way. I wanted to do something then. It was an urge I had. Not a dodgy urge or anything. I just wanted to hold Maggie's hand. That's all.

It was a feeling beyond logic or anything that scientists or researchers or theorists can explain in words or in pictures or in diagrams or in anything else. It's that thing that's always there. That thing that's ancient and deep. That thing that never goes away.

Her hair was even messier than usual and strands of it were stuck to her forehead. I brushed them away from her face as I had dreamed of doing, except in my dream the circumstances were completely different.

She asked me how I'd known where to find her. I said I would have kept on looking until I did. She said she had wanted to do this on her own, that she didn't want to drag anyone else into her situation, that it would be much better if nobody knew about it.

And she obviously wasn't in the mood to explain how this had happened, plus I didn't really think it was the right time to ask her. And she kept on asking me what was going to become of her, and she kept wondering aloud how she was going to
take care of the baby now that the baby was born, and big tears kept on sliding down her face. I tried to cheer her up by telling her a few jokes, and I'm not a hundred percent sure but I think that was a bit of a help, because she wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. Images of George Corporamore crept around in my head: of him feeling Maggie's shoulder that night in the hall, with his pointed fingers, and of him always looking at her as she passed by. I thought about how I wanted to hurt him and kill him and tell him to stay away from her and not to touch her and to leave her alone.

I'm not somebody who turns my back on my responsibilities. I stick around when people need me. I'm not trying to sound like a saint or anything. It's just that I think that's important. Even if I am only a kid.

The baby started to cry a little bit, but I sang her a song for babies that I knew really well. It's got all these words about the first time you see a baby and how you want to keep them warm and safe and stuff. She stopped crying, which was the whole idea.

I gave her back to Maggie. The three of us fell asleep in that broken-down wreck of a place. Maggie and the baby on the old mattress, and me on the floor beside them. And that night, just for a little while, I stopped worrying about everything. We slept a certain type of sleep that can only be slept by people who have done something very important.

You can't be worried all the time. Sometimes you have to take a break from it.

Chapter 18

IT WAS difficult to believe that someone so pointy and hard and ugly could be the father of someone so soft and round and perfectly beautiful. Apparently as soon as Corporamore had found out that Maggie was going to have his baby, he had told her that she had to leave and had forced her to pretend to everyone else, including me and Kevin, that she'd decided to leave of her own accord for no particular reason. She was too ashamed to go to her parents, and she didn't want to be a worry to them, seeing as they had a load more children to feed already, which is why she ended up in the rubbish gate lodge with the wind whistling through it and no proper toilet or running water.

We didn't get to complain about the behavior of George Corporamore, even though it probably would have done us a world of good. There wasn't time.

I didn't need to talk about what we were going to do next, because I had decided that we were going to smuggle Maggie and the baby back to Blackbrick, at least for a few days while we figured out a plan. Ross, one of the coolest
horses of all time, had waited quietly outside the gate lodge for practically the whole night. Now everybody needed to be somewhere that was warm and where there was food nearby.

The baby was small and pretty quiet. It was going to be easy. I told Maggie I was going to take Ross back up to Blackbrick and that I'd be back to get her with Kevin and the cart. She was totally okay with it, but I wasn't going to wait around, just in case she changed her mind.

“By the way, what's her name?” I asked.

“Nora Cosmo McGuire,” Maggie said, looking down at the baby as if there was nothing else to worry about. “Nora for short.”

I woke Kevin up. “What's happened?” was the first thing he said, because when you have something important to tell someone, it must be written all over your face. I told him how I'd found Maggie, and for a second he was delighted, slipping out of his bed and hopping around on one leg trying to get his trousers on, saying, “Well, that's a relief.”

Then I told him about the baby and he fell over.

“A baby? A real baby?” he said when he'd recovered enough to start quizzing me. “What's going on, Cosmo? Why didn't you come and fetch me? What the bloody hell . . .?”

I thought he deserved to know then, about that time I'd seen Maggie and Corporamore in the shadows. But as soon
as I explained, I was sorry I'd even opened my mouth. His jaw tightened and he got a look on his face that I'll never forget. His hands curled up into hard fists and he kept saying something under his breath.

“Cosmo, get out of my way. You've been in my way since you came here. It should have been me. I'm the one she needs. I'm the one who should have been with her all this time. Not you. Not George Corporamore.”

I told him that if he came with me and if he just saw Maggie and the baby, he'd probably calm down.

We hitched Somerville and Ross to the cart, which was easy because by then we were professional experts at it. But Kevin didn't look at me or talk to me at all, not like he usually did. And his face was set in a grim clench and it stayed like that until he saw her.

“Are you all right, Maggie?” was all he could say for a while, but he wasn't smiling and his face wasn't soft the way it usually was when he looked at her.

She held Nora out for him to see. He bit his lip, and very quietly he whispered, “How, Maggie? Why?” Maggie closed her eyes really tight and shook her head from side to side and pressed her lips together, and basically it was obvious she was never going to be in the mood to answer questions like that. Then the baby made this little gurgling squeak of a noise, which lightened the atmosphere a bit.