Free Pureheart by Cassandra Golds Page A

she said piteously.
    â€˜You may not have meant for it to die,’ said her grandmother coolly. ‘But that’s what happens when you cut something’s heart out. Usually.’
    Neither of them understood properly what happened next. Or at least, Deirdre never did understand it, and Gal didn’t come to understand until many years later. There was a visit to a doctor, and then some kind of specialist. And then there was testing – Deirdre answering questions and playing games in a room alone with a friendly, watchful woman who seemed halfway between a doctor and a teacher. Then there was a diagnosis. And this was how it came to pass that Deirdre did not start school until she was twelve.
    She had been classified as Disturbed, because she had killed her pet rabbit and mutilated its body.
    And she was supposed to be in therapy, until she was deemed well enough to have contact with other children. But somehow the therapy never eventuated.
    Deirdre did not know what her grandmother told the doctors, and she would not have had the confidence to oppose her if she had.
    All she remembered, later, were two contradictory things. The dreadful shock it had been to find the rabbit was dead. And the niggling, sick conviction that she had been responsible, even though she remembered nothing.
    It was how she started to feel guilty. Always. About everything.
    That night, as he lay in his bed in the tiny spare room in Mrs Dark’s flat, Gal dreamed that Deirdre was standing beside the bed, looking down into his face with great urgency, as if she needed to tell him something.
    Then he realised he was not dreaming.
    He sat bolt upright in his bed, panting with shock. But Deirdre did not react to his surprise. She went on standing there, gazing down at him, as if there was room in her mind for only one thought. She was wearing the full-length white nightgown she always wore to bed. Her hair was long and straight and fair in the streetlight that poured through the window – for it was never really dark at night in Corbenic – the building was on the main street of the town. It wasn’t quiet either – cars swished past; newspapers were delivered to the newsagency opposite; in the early hours of the morning the garbage trucks trundled their way up the street, stopping outside each building. But Deirdre knew none of this. She just stood there, staring down at him and thinking her one thought.
    â€˜I’m sorry, Gal,’ she said in a strange, listless way, mournfully, and yet somehow without passion. ‘I’m sorry.’
    Gal swallowed, terrified.
    â€˜That’s all right, Deedee,’ he whispered.
    She inclined her head, very slowly, still staring at him, then she turned and left the room.
    He never forgot what she looked like walking away from him, her long white nightdress, her long fair hair. And when she had gone he stayed upright, staring at his doorway, afraid she would come back, until the dawn made it seem safe enough to lie down again.
    He didn’t ask her about it the next morning, but he knew she did not remember.
    It was years before he understood that she had been sleepwalking. At five he did not know what sleepwalking was. But even when he understood that, he could not begin to imagine what it was she was sorry for.
    And then – was it a week later? a month? – something happened to Deirdre and Galahad that was so important, so transcendent, it changed them, and bound them, forever.
    They had been exploring, as usual, in the building. It was raining outside and they could hear the rain dripping down through the many drainpipes. Sometimes Deirdre felt that they lived in a fortress of drainpipes. Gal had been complaining of a pain in his chest. He wasn’t coughing, but Mrs Dark had grown up in this mountain town of pilgrims from the city with hollow cheeks and dark circles under their eyes, people who had tuberculosis and who had come for the pure, healing air. So