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Maggie loved going down to the south gates to look at the old lodge, and she often asked if we didn't mind going there and having a look together. It was illegal, I kept reminding her, and besides there wasn't much to see. On top of all that, it was tormenting for me to go near the south gates—I didn't like to think about the people on the other side and how I had abandoned them. Plus I wasn't that interested in getting caught down there again by George Corporamore, so most of the time I tried to stay away.

The gate lodge was nothing but a crooked little house, a ruin really, but Maggie always said she liked the idea of doing it up and living in it. She said a small house like that, with a cozy fire and good company, and what else would a person need in life? I said she really should start raising her aspirations a bit more.

We learned to cook dinners, and Mrs. Kelly sighed and said, “Remember, Kevin, the lovely dishes that Bernie Doyle used to make?” Bernie Doyle had been the cook. Apparently nobody could ever have lived up to her legendary status, no matter how hard they tried. Maggie was put
on Cordelia duty and had to take her breakfast every day. She didn't even seem to mind that much.

We trained the horses until they could have competed in competitions and won. Whenever we had any free time, we legged it around the corners of the estate that nobody else ever went to anymore on the horses, and shouted various things at each other. We invented an excellent game that involved throwing a potato high up in a big arc and the person on the other horse having to gallop over and catch it in time, and when they did, it was their turn. Might sound kind of stupid, but seriously, it was the best game ever. I'm surprised it's not an actual sport.

Another thing I won't forget is how irritating it is trying to teach people how to read and write. Making up for the past's feeble education system was pretty hard. For one thing, when I was teaching them, Maggie and Kevin kept on chatting to each other and laughing when they should have been concentrating. I started on very easy words, and then a few simple phrases like “The cat sat on the mat.” “Guys, concentrate,” I'd have to keep saying. “I'm trying to improve your overall levels of literacy. You could at least
look
as if you're making an effort.”

Then they might settle down for a bit and get through the exercises I'd given them. It took a long time, but eventually their writing improved and their words got a lot better. I used to get them to write out lines all across the Corporamore notepaper, which was the only paper I had
access to, apart from my notebook, which by then was already full.

No matter how much progress we were making, Maggie said we always had to leave Crispin's wing by seven p.m., “in case Lord Corporamore finds you here.” Kevin never once asked her what on earth Corporamore would actually be doing there in the evenings, and neither did I, even though it was sort of an obvious question. There were times when I was literally dying to ask her, but I never said another word about it. The night before I'd tried to escape from Blackbrick, Maggie had begged me to put certain things right out of my head, and I was trying my best.

Speaking of trying my best, I also did what I could to get Kevin into excellent long-term brain-health habits, but nothing in Blackbrick was a source of omega-3 fatty acids, as far as I could see, except for on Fridays when everyone had to eat mackerel. I wrote out the recipe for smoked salmon pâté in case we ever got our hands on any actual smoked salmon, which frankly was pretty unlikely. But still, when you have knowledge like I had, it's your duty to share it with others who might benefit, so after I'd written it, I pinned it up on the wall in the kitchen. I also wrote a whole load of my own homemade Sudoku puzzles too, which took me ages, and I taught Maggie and Kevin the rules. They caught on pretty fast and got so good that they were soon very bored with them, even when I made them superhard.
They didn't see the point of them. I tried to adopt a positive mental attitude at all times, and I did what I could to get them to do the same.

Everyone says you can't live your life in the past, but I learned to do a fairly decent job of it. It's funny the way time is. Sometimes it feels like it's going to go on forever, and then there are other times when it warps and folds and you don't even know how you got from one season to the next. And besides, even though I'd abandoned the present, it wasn't really my fault. I was a prisoner.

After the day he took the key away, Corporamore didn't ever really say much to me, which was okay as far as I was concerned, because I was never in the mood for having heart-to-hearts with that slimeball. He did come down to the kitchen one day and tell us that someone was to give his daughter riding lessons. Most of the time whenever I saw him coming my way, all I did was try not to look him in the face.

In a Blackbrick winter the place gets so cold that you have to get dressed under the covers of your bed, and when you finally do get out, you have to jump around for centuries before you even begin to get warm.

I never did see another creepy incident with Corporamore and Maggie, which was a relief to me, seeing how basically disturbing that whole particular episode had been. But there were a couple of times when I saw him watching her from a distance, say when she was washing windows or
carrying a tray along the corridor to Cordelia's room. And there were other things about Maggie that had started to make me worry.

It began when she got really, really sick. Kevin told me that she was puking every morning. He said it didn't surprise him too much, considering how the food at Blackbrick wasn't what it used to be. After Christmas she stopped feeling sick and started to get fantastically hungry. Hungrier than me and Kevin put together, which was saying a lot.

Christmas wasn't that different from any other time at Blackbrick, at least not for us, except that Mrs. Kelly crept into my room and left two oranges on my bed along with a midget of a chocolate bar. I saw her do it, but I kept on pretending to be asleep. Kevin rushed in to me a few seconds later, saying wasn't it mighty kind of her, and weren't we dead lucky to have gotten presents like that on a Christmas morning, and I was like, yeah, we must have been born under some kind of freakishly lucky star, all right.

Maggie was getting paler and tireder and sadder-looking all the time. She never complained, so it wasn't like anyone was drawing my attention to it, but I am pretty observant and there are things that I notice that other people never seem to see.

In a Blackbrick spring the sunshine is like big solid bars glaring right down onto your face and making you have to squeeze your eyes together quite tightly. And birds start
to tweet and twitter outside your window and they sound delighted with themselves.

And in a Blackbrick summer everything grows wild and tall, and the solid sunshine bars gleam inside the rooms so that you can see a million sparkling particles of dust floating around like miniature galaxies. And even when it
is
summer, the basement where I used to sleep never gets warm, and the stone walls stay damp and cold. There was no point in complaining, because complaining got you nowhere in Blackbrick, no matter how reasonable your complaint was, unless you were Cordelia, and nobody wanted to be her.

Over the months Kevin's hair got longer and he got quite a lot more grown-up-looking and a good bit thinner. Which at the time was funny, considering how much fatter he thought Maggie had gotten. He wasn't trying to be rude about it or anything, but it was true.

I guess I knew all along what the situation was, but she didn't talk about it to us and we didn't talk about it to her, and the longer silence grows around something, the easier it becomes for everyone to put it out of their minds. It's called denial, which nobody had ever heard of at Blackbrick, but it's basically the only way to explain how we all ignored Maggie's condition.

And I'd been promoted. Instead of a temporary gofer, by then Mrs. Kelly said I was an assistant stable boy. I was proud of myself, because I'd put in the time and I'd earned it.

Kevin and Maggie didn't just learn to read and write. They became literary know-it-alls, which was a bit irritating, seeing as it was me who'd taught them the basic skills.

I'd say that by then, if they'd been in my class, they would both have passed everyone on the reading scale. When the midafternoon stillness settled on Blackbrick, I'd often find them in the kitchen bent over a book, or sometimes even in the room next to Crispin's, where they'd have lit a fire and where Kevin would be lying on his stomach on one of the old sofas, swinging his legs, and Maggie'd be on the floor, stretched on her back with her hands behind her head. Kevin would read aloud—a whole load of complicated, classic, dead long books. Whenever I saw him doing that with her, it always made me feel a bit jealous.

You don't miss people with the same intensity all the time. You can spend days, weeks even, not thinking about someone, and then all of a sudden something reminds you, and it's as if you've been shot in the face with a sadness gun.

Even though I tried to forget, there were times at Blackbrick when I thought about my mum. When she first left, I didn't think she could get any farther away. Now she might as well have been on another planet. I missed my old granddad, too, even though I wondered how I could, seeing as I was living in the middle of his childhood. I was more or less
sure he would be missing me, no matter what everyone was saying about his banjaxed brain.