Prologue
My little brother and I saw a unicorn in the garden in the late nineties. I’m telling you.
Neither one of us made it up; it was as real as anything else. Sometimes, when the world around us grew indistinct, when facts would blur into less certain truths and frightening things looked set to occur, the two of us could see clearly into the Fourth Dimension. So when Linford James was on a ladder at midnight, banging on the bedroom windows, shouting at Mum,
and later, when the color in his throat deepened and they were nose to nose, neither one of them spotted the unicorn. Adults went about their lives missing beauty all the time.
Little Roo was six. I was ten. The unicorn strode a couple of majestic laps of the garden, before vanishing completely into the rosebush. The Fourth Dimension was our only explanation for this. We weren’t dreaming.
That night, Mum called the police. The next evening, Linford was sleeping in her bed again, snoring the walls down in his frightening manner.
The unicorn wasn’t the only strange thing. Living in Chorley, up in the North, we were closer to the sky than most. What luck. Little Roo often saw things written in the stars. Signs, Facts and Other Things. I’m telling you.
He knew why adults said the things they said. And why they didn’t
mean the things they said and even less what they did. Sometimes it wasn’t answers that he found, but entirely perfect questions. A genius, my little brother.
Copyright © 2018 by Yrsa Daley-Ward. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
