The Red Children

Identity. She thought I would yield as soon as she used the word. But what’s your identity, Belinda?

, who was either an artist or maybe a writer, and either bipolar, or recovering from a breakdown,

Belinda, you’re right.’ His best smile. ‘Trouble is, we don’t know what their language is. We know it’s a mixture – a few words of Arabic, bits of Spanish and English, even Italian – but it’s not like anything we know.’

ut Belinda Birch hadn’t left. She stood there behind an armchair in the corner of Winston’s office, pulling at her bleached blonde hair which she daily tortured into a thin tight ponytail, the style she had worn twenty years ago when, with her neat, pointy features and tiny waist, she had won Margate Festival Princess.

. By a racist. Famous case,’ someone else claimed.

someone said, but ‘His uncle was murdered. By

who could say ‘No’ to Winston? Who was rumoured to be so sympathetic to others because he himself had a tragic family history – a twin brother who died, some

‘I hear you,’ said Winston, with his shy, intelligent, winning smile, pushing his halo of dark curly hair back from his forehead and looking them one by one in the eyes.

didn’t look quite human. Everything was slightly shifted, as if in a drawing.

Ravens are messengers, omens who perched on the shoulders of old Norse gods and pointed to past and future. Ravens, the birds who remember.