One day, I decided I was going to write books forever.

Katie soon learned there was a problem with hope.

Bea stared at the pencils as if they were enemies.

Prayer is better than pills.

The breeze around them seemed to drop – dead – like a door to the best things had just closed.

He had become the sky around the sun – alive, but not really there.

Beyond the boundaries of herself, her parents and the enclosing garden walls, were open fields and other waiting places she still knew nothing of – lies of the land, perhaps. What Katie did know is that out there in the lonely nowhere was a special quietness, free of the sounds of daytime birds or foxes at night – and that it was a quietness she might like to listen to one day.

On some days she was able to see both sun and moon at the same time. Like feuding cousins, they hung in two corners of the vast world-ceiling refusing to look at one another. The moon was always harder to spot and more faded, but it was there if you looked, as many things were.

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.

Nearly two years of dates. Still no question. Her mother and father want to set a proper date. Still no question. Her friends keep asking, when, Natasha? When? But she still hasn’t been asked The Question. It’s enjoyable to be the one with all the secrets, but in her honest mind – the hidden part that’s always sleeping – the secrets he keeps about when and if give her a feeling inside she’s never really understood completely – a sensation she had as a child when she got to the end of a fairytale where never-ending love and happiness were all but expected and wondered whether there might be…. one last page.

He remembers how someone – he forgets who – once said in a sarcastic tone, “Isn’t she just Little Miss Sweetness and Light?” – and it was a statement that put him off proposing. It made him seriously reassess his options. He didn’t want to be with someone others saw as overly-moral because he has flaws, he has weaknesses. How would his mistakes compare to her virtuousness? She used to dislike the competitiveness at work, the way she claimed she could never really make friends with anyone because everything was always so fake and cut-throat and he used to berate her for it, used to tell her to accept it, to realise the truth about life and relationships – but she wouldn’t take it. She was always thinking too hard about everything, always questioning her motives. Surely, if he’d married her, she’d have started questioning his.

Time is not an enemy as such, but a missing person, sending cryptic postcards from the past.

Youngsters deserve no opinions.

For no real reason – well, perhaps because of the seriousness under the trees or Nader’s hair, which was very messy and covered in little grass seeds – Katie began to giggle. She knew it was wrong, yet it was also natural. She covered her mouth with both hands, but Nader was already pale with revulsion. He turned and marched away into unwanted sunlight, leaving her to wonder why bad things happened and why no good person prevented them.

A silence absorbed them both – a lack of sound so potent it blackened the place with something richer than hate.

She heard him speak, but did not recognise the problem in his voice – only later did she realise it was that thing he’d been concealing – known as guilt.

Too old for dolls. Too ill for tablets.

The fear of silence is a fear everyone should overcome.

Shush – it’s silent time again.

I’ve always thought that the best moments can come from the worst times.

Nader refused to bring her the feathery dream catcher – her asabikeshiinh – with its willow-web and invisible ‘lady spider’ apparently weaving her spells – an object Bea insisted always hung above her in bed.

I’ll be your friend until you find a better one.

When people say, 'you're so young to be a writer,' I always reply, 'I started young because I've got a lot to write.

I lose it when I can't write. I feel sad and confused and fucked off.

I do not do free e-books. I occasionally like to eat that thing you people call "food".

I suffered my own battles. I suffer still.