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By Root 521 0

said. Her mother was frowning. She was working at her computer in her office, doing admin, which is short for administration, which is short for migraine-stimulant. She stopped typing and looked up, looked over at the arch of the window where Brooke was pretending to tightrope-walk the edge of one of the big stones in the floor. Then surely you must also be able to mur, Brooke said. I mur with you about that, her mother said. Brooke curled on the flagstones laughing at the word mur. Her mother came over and tickled her until they were both lying there on the old stone floor, laughing helplessly. You and me, her mother said when they got their breath back, we just made up a word. We so did, Brooke said. Her mother sat up, nodded, ruffled Brooke’s hair, got up off the floor and went back to the admin of phil and lit.)

The fact of the matter is, Brooke spoke to a lady this morning who had paid the Psychic man the £30 for her special channelled message from Mr. Garth in the room. Brooke asked the lady what her special message was. The lady smiled a smile like she knew a secret. She said she couldn’t possibly tell anyone what Milo had meant to say only to her. Then Brooke asked her was she sure, could she know for sure, that the message came from Mr. Garth in the room. And the lady said she was surer of that than of anything else in her life. But that lady doesn’t know. That lady has no idea, like everybody else way way out of the loop, because first, everybody who knows anything knows that Milo isn’t Mr. Garth’s real name. And second, anybody who is anybody in this history knows what the real fact is about Mr. Garth, the one that was making Mrs. Lee cry on the stairs yesterday because all the badges and the T-shirts and the caps and key rings and the inscribed Easter eggs that she organized and invested thousands and thousands of pounds in will soon maybe not be worth money any more.

(No one must know, is what Mrs. Lee said yesterday when they found out. Josie Lee went to get her a Valium. What do you give an elephant who’s cracking up. Trunkquillizers. Joke. It happened yesterday morning. Brooke went in and Mrs. Lee was crying on the stairs. Brooke went all the way up the stairs. The door to the room was open. So Brooke gathered up the The fact is notes, they were all piled neatly up on the sideboard under the clean knife and fork and under them all was the paper aeroplane with the story on it that begins The fact is, like it is a kind of The fact is note! and with Brooke’s name there on the wing of it when she turned it over. She could not see, anywhere in the room, the story she did for Mr. Garth and put under the door on Friday lunchtime, about the journey through time (at the end of which Brooke has given it two endings so there is an alternative). But there did not seem to be any other bits of paper left in the room. Brooke put the ones she’d found, which were hers because she wrote them in the first place, and the plane which Mr. Garth made and wrote on, which was hers to take because it is addressed to her, inside her jumper and tucked her jumper into her belt. Then she came back down the stairs and stood behind Mrs. Lee, who was crying like anything even though she could go and stand in the real room now any time she liked. No one can see by looking, can they? is what Mrs. Lee was saying. No one can tell from the outside, can they? she said wiping her eyes, taking the glass of water and drinking it so fast that she nearly choked.)

The fact is, Anna knows. Josie knows. Mr. Palmer knows. Brooke knows. Mrs. Lee has sworn them all to secrecy but it is the kind of secret Brooke decided she could tell her parents, so Brooke’s parents know too. But if all the people outside knew, it might make them feel even more metaphorically like they can’t vote in the election. Plus, Mrs. Lee is not the only person who will lose money and maybe some people will lose their jobs because of it, like the Psychic, who has been giving out messages as usual all day yesterday and all morning today like nothing has happened, to all the people