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to the park and collect autumn leaves and twigs and fashion them into crosses for the altar at Saint Jude’s.
    And on the first Sunday in May—as the people of Mummer’s village had done since time immemorial—we would go out into the garden before Mass and wash our faces in the dew.
    There was something special about The Loney. To Mummer, Saint Anne’s shrine was second only to Lourdes; the two mile walk across the fields from Moorings was her Camino de Santiago. She was convinced that there and only there would Hanny stand any chance of being cured.

Chapter Four
    H anny came home from Pinelands at the start of the Easter holidays, bristling with excitement.
    Even before Farther had turned off the car engine, he was running down the drive to show me the new watch Mummer had given him. I had seen it in the window of the shop where she worked. A heavy, golden-coloured thing with a picture of Golgotha on the face and an inscription from Matthew on the back:
    Therefore, be aware. Because you do not know the day or the hour.
    ‘That’s nice, Hanny,’ I said and gave it back to him.
    He snatched it off me and slipped it on his wrist before handing over a term’s worth of drawings and paintings. They were all for me. They always were. Never for Mummer or Farther.
    ‘He’s very glad to be home, aren’t you, Andrew?’ said Mummer, holding the door open for Farther to bundle Hanny’s suitcase through the porch.
    She tidied Hanny’s hair with her fingers and held him by the shoulders.
    ‘We’ve told him that we’re going back to Moorings,’ she said. ‘He’s looking forward to it already. Aren’t you?’
    But Hanny was more interested in measuring me. He put his palm on the top of my head and slid his hand back towards his Adam’s apple. He had grown again.
    Satisfied that he was still the bigger of the two of us, he went up the stairs as noisily as he always did, the banister creaking as he hauled himself from step to step.
    I went into the kitchen to make him a cup of tea in his London bus mug and when I found him in his room he still had on the old raincoat of Farther’s that he had taken a shine to years before and insisted on wearing whatever the weather. He was standing by the window with his back to me looking at the houses on the other side of the street and the traffic going by.
    ‘Are you alright, Hanny?’
    He didn’t move.
    ‘Give me your coat,’ I said. ‘I’ll hang it up for you.’
    He turned and looked at me.
    ‘Your coat, Hanny,’ I said, shaking his sleeve.
    He watched me as I undid the buttons for him and hung it on the peg on the back of the door. It weighed a ton with all the things he kept in the pockets to communicate with me. A rabbit’s tooth meant he was hungry. A jar of nails was one of his headaches. He apologised with a plastic dinosaur and put on a rubber gorilla mask when he was frightened. He used combinations of these things sometimes and although Mummer and Farther pretended they knew what it all meant, only I really understood him. We had our world and Mummer and Farther had theirs. It wasn’t their fault. Nor was it ours. That’s just the way it was. And still is. We’re closer than people can imagine. No one, not even Doctor Baxter, really understands that.
    Hanny patted the bed and I sat down while he went through his paintings of animals and flowers and houses. His teachers. Other residents.
    The last painting was different, though. It was of two stick figures standing on a beach littered with starfish and shells. The sea behind them was a bright blue wall that rose like a tsunami. To the left were yellow mountains topped with mohicans of green grass.
    ‘This is The Loney, isn’t it?’ I said, surprised that he remembered it at all. It had been years since we’d been there and Hanny rarely drew anything that he couldn’t see right in front of him.
    He touched the water and then moved his finger to the camel hump dunes, over which hung a great flock of