Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

The car accelerated so quickly she was thrown back against her seat. ‘What are you doing?’ her mother gasped. They rounded a sharp bend in the road and Poppy was thrown against the window. ‘Put on your seatbelt,’ her mother shouted. ‘Steve, what are you doing? Stop the car. Stop the car.’

‘You think you know about art?’ he roared, pushing on the accelerator. The car flew over a speed bump, almost knocking them out of their seats and causing Poppy’s spine to slam back down again. ‘You don’t know a thing about art.’

Another speed bump and, though she’d braced herself, it tore a cry of terror from her as she lifted off the seat.

When they turned the next corner they narrowly missed another car, which swerved past, horn blaring. Poppy felt the air evaporate from her throat.

‘You’re driving like a madman, Ste—Watch out!’ They’d driven right off the road, juddered up onto the pavement and burst through the picket fence surrounding the common. Stephen was charging towards the pond and, for a horrifying moment, Poppy thought they were heading right into the cold water, but he turned them around at the last second with a shout of delight and trundled over the grass.

The car accelerated again, heading for a group of ducks, and both Poppy and her mother screamed as something rolled under the tyres. Feathers flew up by the window and the air filled with the squeal of birds, the crunch of branches and bone. ‘Stephen!’ Poppy’s mother shoved his hands off the steering wheel and Poppy squeezed her eyes shut as the car lurched back towards the pond. They were going to plunge in, she was sure of it, but she was too scared to unbuckle her seatbelt.

Then, she felt the car slow under her and come to a sudden stop. Scrambling to open the door, Poppy made it out just in time to throw up on the grass.

When she finished and wiped the side of her mouth, she was surprised to find that she was crying. Heat spread across her face as more sobs came and she did nothing to wipe them away. She walked away from the car for a while, sat on the bench overlooking the scummy pond.

The sky was a disgusting colour, and she was shivering in her thin pyjamas. She wished she’d brought a coat in addition to her now-soiled slippers. There were Coke cans floating in the pond, and when her tears finally subsided she could see across the water to Stephen’s car, and the feathers smeared into the tyres. She wondered if her mother was okay, and knew that she had to go back. When she did, she couldn’t spot either of the adults behind the windscreen and wondered if they had walked off and left her. Then she saw her mother in the back seat. She was being attacked. Poppy pressed her face against the window but then wished she hadn’t. Understanding came to her all at once; her mother squeezing Stephen’s hair in a wet fist, the knife-bright slice of thigh, a jet spray of hair at the base of Stephen’s spine, his bottom waxing over the edge of his loosened belt.

She ran.

As the wind stung her eyes she thought that she heard her mother’s voice calling out behind her, but she didn’t look back.

A WEEK LATER, STEPHEN finally left for good. Poppy was called out of her class by the school’s receptionist and driven to the hospital. For the rest of her life, whenever Poppy recalled the way her mother looked that day – tiny and helpless, folded in on herself, her eyes closed, still connected to a drip – it was with a twist of pain. ‘Has she done this before?’ the social worker asked.

Poppy had nodded. ‘A couple of times.’

Poppy was filled, then, with an urgent terror that if she spent another year in that flat she would die there.

So she applied to Dalton, applied to everywhere that would take her, and only thought about how she might pay for it when the acceptances slipped through the letter box.

Even after she was accepted by Dalton Academy, and most of her time was spent with her new friends in the grounds of the school, the dread rose up in her whenever the holidays approached.

There was only so long she could survive in that flat in Liverpool, breathing air that was stale with her mother’s misery. And, although there was a nostalgic tether that tugged at her every time she left, although the cracked roads rose up to meet her, although her mother begged her not to leave when the term began – the tide of dread and self-preservation was always stronger, beckoning Poppy further and further out again.

Chapter 22 JUNO

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