NOT TO BE ESPECIALLY ENID BLYTON

about things, but there were five of us and we moved into a house for a year—flip open Five Run Away Together—that house with the golden door buried in the central hallway and the wonderful bond of unity. We were Bazum and Ben and Early and Aurora and myself. I say we were and not we are because I don’t believe I’m the same person, anymore. That Roland is dead forever. Certain things may be the same, of course, or hardly changed. I still, unfortunately, slur my esses slightly when I particularly wish to speak well. And Bazum has kept her critical sharp eye for other people in the room, and Aurora still embarrasses herself in front of horror films, and I talked to Ben on the phone the other day and he still likes to speak in catchphrases. Things happened, and other things didn’t happen, as is always the way, and this is how they did or did not come about, how circumstances gathered together like a fish and another fish and another, until there is a school of fish, a silver cloud of uncountable mackerel drawing in all other gleaming bodies. And the black shadows of ships cape overhead as we flicker below, our mouths widening in the dark and we dart in a different direction forever. And the part of me I know is changed by the parts of me that I did not know. But what do you want? What do you expect? Others were changed by themselves, also, and together we changed each other. Not always pleasantly.