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First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers

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For my children, who started life as this novel took shape

Extract from ‘Who’s Afraid of the Dark?’, Higher English Reflective Essay by Joanie

Sinclair, Hallow’s Hill Secondary School, 2012

I have an embarrassing confession to make. I am sixteen years old and I still use night lights. Each evening, when the sun goes down I have to switch three of them on in a particular order. The first is my favourite, a glass rabbit. Its long ears lie against its back and its body shines like a full moon. The star lamp is next, then a toadstool, dotted with light. I know they look childish in my teenage bedroom, alongside my band posters and makeup brushes, but I need them. The ritual started a year ago, when I became paralysed by the dark.

Joanie, June 2013

In this corner of Fife, summer nights meant parties on wind-blown beaches. Joanie and her friends would wrap themselves in hoodies and denim jackets, and pretend they weren’t cold in the stubborn evening light.

Tonight Joanie’s boyfriend, Adam, had told their classmates to gather at the hamlet of Boar’s Raik, its bay marked by a bulbous mass of sandstone. School was over and they were celebrating. The rock was known locally as Buddy, looking as it did like a squashed face, watching the beach. The June sky was clear and bright when the first match was lit. As was the ritual, they gathered in a circle around a heap of driftwood, debris and a small collection of textbooks and essays. Joanie scanned the small crowd. One lanky boy was wearing a sheep mask, its plastic face wobbling grotesquely as he danced a jig in the sand. No sign of her best friend, Cara. She was flying to Paris the next morning but had promised to show up.

Her boyfriend had climbed on to a boulder above the fire. ‘Here we go, folks!’ he yelled, while his friends cheered. He held a branch aloft, then stopped in his tracks. ‘Alright Cameron?’

The large, auburn-haired boy had joined the group silently, a carrier-bag of beer in one hand.

‘Don’t worry,’ Adam said, with a cruel smile as he set a branch alight. ‘Joanie’s safe and sound.’

A couple of people laughed. Joanie cringed. Everyone had seen the video by now. She was lying on the library floor, stage blood smeared on her face, Cameron kneeling over her, looking around in shock, before Joanie and the cameraman had corpsed into laughter.

‘It’s such a shame, though,’ one girl was saying, adding more school work to the fire. ‘I thought he was having a pure heart attack.’

‘Adam,’ Cameron said, from the edge of the circle, ‘just get on with it.’

‘Alright ya beetroot,’ Adam replied, throwing the burning branch into the firewood. King of the year group, he looked older than his eighteen years, his long, fair hair swept into a bun on top of his head.

Joanie knew he hated the video, probably more than Cameron. If he’d had his way she wouldn’t so much as smile at another boy.

They were still giddy from Friday’s Muck-up Day. Prank phone calls and conga lines and water bombs. Cara had drawn chalk outlines of pupils’ bodies in

the car park, like a crime scene. One boy had gone from room to room playing Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ on the bagpipes. The video prank had been Tatey’s idea: Miss Scarlett, in the library, with a candlestick. He had hidden behind a bookcase, then filmed it on his phone.

Joanie believed that she and Tatey had stolen the show. Tatey in particular was already known for playing pranks, usually roping in Joanie and Cameron somehow, but the video had been shared so many times, she imagined the incident would become school lore.

Tiny lights bobbed in the distance, as more teenagers picked their way through the fields and down the steep, sandy steps towards the fire. It was too dark to see whether one of them was Cara. When Adam planned a party, people wanted to come. He had built his reputation by organizing Neuklear Fusion, a local Battle of the Bands. Adam would photograph Joanie for the flyers he made. Last time she had stood on a rock wearing a polka-dot prom dress and sixties eyeliner, a band of artificial roses in her hair. Cameron had posted ‘hot’ in a comment under the picture. Adam had been furious, even when Joanie had been adamant he had nothing to worry about.

Joanie wore the same flower crown now, standing in skinny jeans. Adam was speaking like a terrible music journalist, proclaiming that a new song could really ‘push the musical palette’ or that ‘The true

genius of electroclash has never been fully acknowledged.’ Trying to get his attention, she looped her arms round his neck, mid-sentence, and gazed into his eyes, his friends watching.

Soon, other voices grew louder in the burning, salty air. Girls and boys ran in and out of the shadows, playing one last game before they had to grow up.

An elbow nudged her. ‘This is the last time we’ll ever be together like this,’ said her neighbour Graham, squinting into the firelight. He turned to a group of boys, holding his beer aloft.

‘Well, thank God for that.’ Cara’s voice, her face hidden by her tousled red hair, as she reached for a beer in the cool box.

‘You made it!’ Joanie squeaked, giving Cara a hug. The collar studs of her friend’s biker jacket grazed her cheek.

Cara smiled in scarlet lipstick. ‘Of course, babe. Come on. I was stuck at the garage with Doris. The worst timing.’

‘Doris!’ Joanie said, the name of Cara’s VW Beetle. The car had been the cornerstone of their social lives that year. If it was ever forensically tested, traces of Joanie’s vomit and makeup could probably still be found staining its back seat.

‘Doris is an old lady,’ Cara said, as they moved away from the boys, to talk in private. ‘I haven’t even finished packing yet and my flight’s literally at six a.m.’

‘Just pull an all-nighter,’ Joanie replied. She didn’t want Cara to leave her here. ‘Au pair or no pair.’ She rummaged in a nearby carrier-bag to fish out two more beers.

‘You’re kidding,’ Cara said, the firelight illuminating her hair. ‘My job starts as soon as I arrive. I wouldn’t be able to speak French, let alone look after three kids.’

‘What’s the name of the family again?’ Joanie asked. ‘The Fourchettes?’

‘The Fauchers,’ Cara replied.

‘Oh! Excusez-moi, Madame Fourchette,’ Joanie said, in her Advanced Higher French accent. ‘Je suis désolée, mais j’aime – uh – to party.’

‘Nailed it,’ said Cara, closing her eyes. In the crowd behind them, Cameron was glancing at them nosily. Monsieur Giroud, their French teacher, called him le Francophile. She wondered if he was still annoyed with her about the prank.

A couple of hours later, the crowd had swelled. Flames cast long shadows into the late-falling dusk. At some point in the proceedings, Adam, half-cut, jumped off the rocks with a roar. Joanie sighed and picked a strand of hair from her sticky mouth. She noticed some other girls in the crowd wearing flower crowns, cheaper versions. Sometimes classmates copied things she wore. She realized she would miss that, as she took a swig of vodka from a hip flask.

‘ Tu me manques ,’ Joanie said, making eyes at Cara under her flower crown, as Cara hugged herself for warmth. Her jacket barely covered her flimsy tea-dress.

Her friend shook her head. ‘Alright, Lana Del Rey, I’ve not even gone yet. You’ll be off hiking the Rocky Mountains with that guy.’ Cara jerked her thumb towards Adam, who was rolling about in the sand like a dog.

‘Hmm, more like waiting tables, at least to start,’ Joanie replied. The couple would be working at Gassy Jack’s, a restaurant run by Adam’s uncle in Vancouver. It would make a change from doing shifts in a gift shop. They had planned their itinerary while rearranging Viking helmets and multilingual guidebooks at a local visitor centre for the Isle of Maeyar.

‘We’re going to talk all the time, OK?’ Cara was leaning in close, carefully sober. Her faded red lipstick was smudged. Her fringe almost covered her eyes. ‘I hate this, but I have to go now. My dad’s insisting on picking me up.’

‘Lame!’ Joanie shouted into the sky. Her eyes stung and her nose started to run. She leaned into Cara, putting a hand on her friend’s shoulder to steady herself. She hadn’t eaten much today. ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Tatey?’ she said, too loud, stumbling over a beer can.

Cara rolled her eyes. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because you looove him?’ Joanie said. ‘Go easy on those jazz cigarettes,’ said Cara. It was something they said to make each other laugh.

Joanie couldn’t remember what had started it. ‘Hey!’ Cara turned and stalked over to Adam, her ankle boots kicking up sand. ‘That’s me off. Make sure your girlfriend doesn’t fall down a ravine, OK?’

‘I’ll miss you, Nutjob,’ replied Adam, going in for a hug.

Cara winked at Joanie over his shoulder. ‘Don’t get too messy,’ she called. They had never spoken about a drunken, tearful night a few weeks ago when Cara had told Joanie she needed to break up with Adam. She was wrong, of course. It had just been a bad argument. All couples had them. Joanie watched her friend disappear up the sand dune, her tangled hair the only spot of brightness in the dusk.

Cameron, December 2023

When I finally managed to fall asleep on the late-night train to Edinburgh, I entered a strange, claustrophobic dream. I saw my feet on the stone steps of my old school library. My early-lunch pass was in one hand. When I pushed open the royal blue door, the warm air was infused with the smell of plastic dust jackets.

The library was empty. A couple of books were strewn on the floor. Then I saw her feet, sticking out from one of the aisles. It was my old friend Joanie, lifeless but still beautiful, blood staining her mouth. I fell to my knees, scared to touch her fragile body. Her eyes stared blankly at me. I grabbed her wrist to try and find a pulse, and that was when I noticed she was holding a brass candlestick.

The train jolted me awake as it hit a bump. Fields sped by in the darkness of a Scottish morning. Soon we’d reach Edinburgh and I’d board an early train to Fife. A ghost of my face stared back at me in the glass. It was Christmas Eve and I was almost home.

Extract from ‘Who’s Afraid of the Dark?’ by

Joanie Sinclair, 2012

It happened the night Mum and Gary, her partner, visited Judy, my step-granny, Gary’s mother. She was excited to meet Elise, her new grandchild. I was invited too, but I didn’t want to go. I wanted to spend one night without being woken up by my tiny, colicky sister. I had to promise Mum I wouldn’t have a party while they were gone. I also had to promise her that Cara, my best friend, would stay over to keep me company. That day, of all days, Cara started throwing up before she reached my house. Never trust supermarket sushi. I should have told my mother that Cara wasn’t coming, but I didn’t.

Joanie, June 2013

Ignoring Adam, Joanie swivelled towards the huge rock and noticed a head poke out from a long gap in the middle. The person, a girl she recognized from her year, waved a joint towards her, as a question. Joanie looked back at Adam, who was roughhousing his friends, then strode over to join her. Someone, long ago, had carved steps in the middle of the rock, which continued down the other side. Teenagers now filled the space, bringing bravado and uncertainty with them.

‘Daniel,’ she said, with mock-formality, to the lanky boy who crouched at the top of the steps, rolling another joint one-handed. Everybody called him Tatey. The sheep mask was perched on top of his long, dark hair. If he wasn’t an idiot, he would be kind of good-looking. That was what she told Cara, whenever Cara talked about him. Space was created for her to sit next to him. ‘I thought you were dead,’ someone said, joking about the video in the library.

Tatey shrugged. It wasn’t just Muck-up Day: he, Joanie and even Cameron had started pranking each other in primary school. To everyone else at their secondary, Adam included, it didn’t even make sense that they were friends. Tatey was an undeniable slacker, Cameron hung out with the geeks in the library, and Joanie was now with the kids who hosted parties. The popular people.

On the rock, a marker pen was passed from person to person to write goodbye messages on clothing. Tatey wrote a whole sentence on the long sleeve of Joanie’s surf T-shirt. ‘In Heaven,’ Tatey wrote, ‘all the interesting people are missing.’ The pen pressed against her arm. He caught her eye and something passed between them. Cara, she thought. Cara would hate me.

‘Seriously, though.’ Another boy was speaking beside them in a rush of smoke. ‘Do you ever think there’s, like, a simulated universe? The multiverse?’

A girl answered in a voice that set Joanie’s teeth on edge: ‘I don’t believe in the simulation hypothesis. But I’ve heard there’s evidence of a multiverse now.’

‘Come again?’ Tatey asked.

‘They discovered our universe is like a bubble,’ the girl continued. ‘A bubble that got kind of bruised by other bubbles. It’s been proven.’ It was Mia speaking; of course it was. A girl who could have been pretty if she had given it some thought. Instead, she had just received the ultimate nerd prize: the

school Dux for Sciences. Her name would appear in gold Gothic lettering on a plaque in the assembly hall. Something likely to be filmed by a documentary crew in a few years to come, when she had won the Nobel science award, or whatever it was called.

‘Wow, Mia. Go easy on those jazz cigarettes,’ called Joanie, her voice cutting sharply through the dark. The bodies around her started huffing with a laughter that grew wild against the roar of the sea.

Mia rose and started to pick her way unsteadily down the stone steps to the beach, turning her back on them all in her awkwardly shaped denim jacket.

Joanie tilted her head up, pretending not to notice. There was something comforting about this tangle of teenage arms and legs, a beached sea monster. The stars shone down through the gap in the rock. Joanie looked up at space for what could have been minutes or hours. Bruised bubbles? She was pretty sure that was bullshit. There were no other worlds. And this one was too frictional to be a simulation.

When Joanie finally crawled out of the nook in the rock, the nervy anxiety that plagued her day to day had stopped, like the absence of white noise. Back on the beach, the wind hit her in the face. The party was in full swing. She scanned the crowd for Adam. Their school was big and word had spread, it was clear. The bonfire towered above them, sending a flurry of embers into the sky, like backwards, hot rain. Stumbling between the dark

knots of adolescents, she couldn’t find her boyfriend. She didn’t recognize many of the shadowy faces. She started to feel sick.

When she moved out to the coolness of the dunes, she spotted Cameron again. He hadn’t yet noticed her, as he talked to a girl with a mousy face. Joanie reached up behind him and covered his eyes with her slim, cold hands. ‘Guess who?’

She could tell he was blushing in the dark, his shoulders tense. ‘I think I know,’ he said. ‘I think I know who this is.’

She enjoyed this pretend flirting, partly because it clearly irritated the other girl. ‘Aw, Cam, you know I’m only teasing you.’ She asked him to write on her dove grey T-shirt. He looked even more awkward than usual. The other girl gave him a meaningful look. Joanie had interrupted something.

‘We were just talking about uni,’ Cameron said hurriedly. His face was pinched. ‘I’m studying French. What are you doing again, Joanie? Oh, you’re taking a gap year. I forgot.’

‘Then I’m doing English at Aberdeen. Why are you speaking like that, Cam?’ Joanie asked. ‘Have you seen Adam? I can’t find him anywhere. The bastard.’

The mention of Adam’s name seemed to alarm Cameron further. The girl gave an exasperated look and turned to light a cigarette in the cold Fife wind. Joanie tried to place her in the hierarchical seating

arrangements of the school canteen, but came up with nothing. There was a brief moment of silence, filled by the endless shush of the sea.

This was weird. ‘So, let me know if you see him . . .’ Joanie said, turning to leave.

‘Yeah, I know. I know,’ the girl said, rubbing the back of her neck. Cameron looked irritated.

‘What do you know?’ Joanie’s speech was slower than normal, numbness creeping in.

‘What I mean is, I know Adam,’ the girl said.

Joanie did recognize her after all. She was Mia’s friend. She had done something different too, a haircut or contact lenses, trying to change herself into a grown-up. At school she sat at the table for the school-newspaper geeks.

‘Have you heard of the multiverse?’ Joanie asked. The weed was having an effect. She tried to pull herself together. ‘Maybe Adam got lost. This party’s a lot bigger than we had actually planned so I need to find him and . . .’ Her voice was hoarse.

Cameron grabbed Joanie’s arm tightly. ‘Wait a sec, OK?’ he said. Cameron knew exactly where her boyfriend was.

‘Yeah,’ said the girl, reluctantly. ‘Hang with us. Whatever.’ She was masking something. Joanie looked around her, convinced she was being watched.

‘Joanie,’ the girl said, her speech slurring. ‘I’ve been trying not to say this. But I’ve maybe had a

few, I admit.’ She staggered forward. Joanie stepped back. ‘Now school’s over, I’ll probably never see you again. I just wanna say you were such a bitch.’

‘I don’t . . . What?’ This was so confusing.

‘It’s all good, like.’ It clearly wasn’t. The girl’s voice was hoarse and shaky. ‘No worries. I just wanted to let you know. When you passed us in the corridor or whatever, you’d look at us like we weren’t even . . . Like we were pieces of shit. ’

‘I don’t even really know who you are ,’ Joanie said, her voice cracking.

‘OK,’ Cameron butted in, apologetically. ‘This is a party. School’s over. Let’s try to move on.’

Silence slipped back, like the tide. Joanie watched a distant, illuminated cruise ship and felt a glimmer of sobriety that flickered and went out.

Cameron tried again. ‘I’m going to Glasgow and Chloë is . . .’ Chloë, that was it. Cameron’s voice sank under the weight of whatever he was attempting to hide. Through the fug, she assumed her boyfriend was doing drugs somewhere. It wasn’t such a big deal.

‘He’s out in the dunes, isn’t he?’ she asked, smiling involuntarily.

Cameron gave a bleak smile. ‘OK, on you go,’ he said, as Joanie pushed past him.

Away from the light of the party, she lost her footing in the soft, steep sand. Walls of dark grass blocked her way here and there. She switched on the

harsh light of her phone’s torch and looked back towards the bonfire, where figures were moving like shadow puppets. She had gone too far and was about to turn back to Cameron and Chloë when she heard a gasp. A few strides ahead of her, a hand rose and fell from behind a mound of sand. ‘Adam?’

There was silence. Joanie stumbled over in the semi-dark, her torch wavering. Her foot got tangled in material. A sandy denim jacket that looked oddly familiar.

There was a breathy, feminine moan. The male voice hissed, ‘Sssh!’

She should have left then, but self-control had vanished.

The male voice was her boyfriend’s. She found him crouching among the dunes in his yellow T-shirt and nothing else. His other hand was covering the mouth of a topless girl, who lay beneath him, brown curly hair tangled over her face.

Mia’s face.

Joanie had the strange urge to laugh and feel like she wanted to throw up at the same time. ‘Fuck you,’ she said, and kicked sand at them. She turned and staggered away, like a wounded animal, her legs making the sea grass whisper. As she clambered up the slopes of sand and found the rugged path to the fields, all she could think about was how ugly Mia was. An ugly child. She had been caught in something cruel, dream-like. Her brief

eye contact with Adam had made her want to die.

Joanie stopped at the stile on the edge of a field and caught her breath. She could look down from the high bank to the beach. She made out the figures of Cameron and Chloë, huddled, murmuring, clearly looking around for her. They could go fuck themselves too. She had to get far away from this place, if not disappear altogether.

Once she was over the wire fence and walking across the field, she slowed down. By the time she climbed the gate to the main road it was fully dark and the sharp night air stung her hot, swollen eyes. The flower crown had fallen off somewhere along her route. She wiped her eyes and caught the words ‘BONNE CHANCE’ scribbled in Cameron’s handwriting on her sleeve.

Cameron, Christmas Eve 2023

By the time I arrived at the small station, the latewinter sun had finally risen. The air felt cold and clean in my lungs as I hobbled off the Edinburgh train in a small crowd of passengers. I’d reached Waverley at an unholy hour from London, the cramped seating making me feel like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I hoped the bargain overnight train ticket was worth it. I wasn’t quite home yet. Beyond the train tracks at this station, Edenmouth, lay frosted fields and the local military airbase. Its rows of suburban pebble-dashed houses looked incongruous among barbed wire and jet-plane hangars.

I turned towards the footbridge and my heart leaped. Gurning down from the bridge was a man wearing a sheep’s head. Terror seized me. The ghoulish mask looked oddly familiar. The lanky body underneath started jigging down the steps.

‘Tatey!’ I yelled. My breath came out in clouds. He had agreed to give me a lift home, but I wished

I hadn’t asked. A family and an elderly couple were walking a few paces ahead of me, unperturbed. They were used to weird students from St Rule. They didn’t know that Tatey was too old for this.

‘Cab for Morris?’ the sheep-man drawled, deadpan. It had been a long time since anyone had addressed me by my surname. His long dark hair was tied in a greasy ponytail.

‘St Gregory’s wants you back in the flock,’ I replied. I hoped one of my fellow passengers would absolve me from this ridiculous behaviour. In London, I wouldn’t have cared, but here someone might tell my mum. Or Father Thomas. I was a teacher, for Christ’s sake.

Instead of giving him a friendly hug, I wrestled the mask off his sweaty face and, surprising myself, ran up the ramp on the bridge, my suitcase catching my heels. He chased me with unexpected agility, like we were fifteen again. I’d nearly made it to the car park when he shoved me towards a wall. He was actually pretty strong. That, I had forgotten.

‘You bastard,’ I said, out of breath. ‘Merry Christmas.’

A compact, eighties throwback, his old Bessie of a camper van hadn’t changed. I was surprised it was still running. He hefted my suitcase into the back, while I folded myself into the passenger seat. The VW’s brown, mismatched doors and curtains

were weirdly reassuring. ‘Your parents not about?’ he asked, as I tossed the sheep mask to the back.

‘They don’t know I’m here,’ I said. ‘It’s a surprise.’ The van still smelt of stale weed. He was nothing if not consistent.

Tatey slammed his body behind the wheel and turned on the ignition. Heavy metal blared. He seemed in a particularly good mood. ‘You always were a dark horse,’ he said, over the noise.

‘I’m the whitest horse that ever lived,’ I replied, unsure if he could hear me as we rumbled along to the cold coastal road towards St Rule.

My local town, St Rule, had always made me feel like an outsider. As we passed its medieval walls, they looked austere in the frosted light. When people asked me where I was from, I’d prefer to say ‘Fife’, or even a more general ‘Scotland’, than mention its name. People tended to associate the place with a kind of pink-shirted, floppy-haired elitism, based on the student population. Or a persistent stereotype, at least. In reality, all sorts of people studied there. Its crumbling architecture provided our small town with a portal to the rest of the world.

The town is known for three centuries-old obsessions: academia, golf and religion. Its three long streets hide secret wynds and chambers, sites of witchcraft and sectarian persecution. Maybe this is why I have always felt a sense of claustrophobia

among its libraries and churches and golf courses. Its three paths to enlightenment all require intense focus. The golfer will talk with just as much fervour as the professor or minister about bettering themselves amid the ferocious sea wind.

My shoulders relaxed after we had passed the town and were headed towards Boar’s Raik, closer to our tiny village. As the links course turned into fields, I saw the top of the rock we used to call Buddy. In that moment, I could feel cold hands covering my eyes and a girl’s voice saying, ‘Guess who?’

Whatever happened to Joanie? That teenage girl, playing dead in the library.

Extract from ‘Who’s Afraid of the Dark?’ by

Joanie Sinclair, 2012

People often think of teenage girls as difficult, rebellious, sneaky. Hand on heart, while my family left me home alone that night, I was good. I wanted to have a wild party, I wanted to invite a boy over, but I didn’t. Instead, I painted my nails the colour of cherries and listened to the haunting melodies of Lana Del Rey. When I was fifteen, the night it happened, I didn’t have many friends. All of them were girls. I didn’t feel lonely that night, because I had Tinsel to keep me company. She was my cat.