Gliff—Ali Smith

[I am reading this 2024 novel in four sections, writing about each one before reading on. So far I have read two sections. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]

3 January 2026

The first half of Horse

Horse is the first long section of the novel. It’s narrated by an adolescent, Briar or Bri, forced to look after their younger sister Rose. And, really, we have no idea what is happening. Does Briar know? Not really, although these kids seem to be used to the stranger elements of the near-future world they live in. We seem to be in England where a lot of things we take for granted in the 2020s seem not to apply, or not necessarily. It seems that Ali Smith has done what plenty of other writers have been doing in our century, projected forward in time a lot of unwelcome trends that we can already see.

We’re made to feel disorientated right from the start. On the first page, Bri notes how different their mother looks in the clothes she has to wear to work at an upmarket ‘art hotel’. ‘The women and girls weren’t allowed make up or earrings or necklaces. Our mother looked smaller, duller, scrubbed clean and cloistery, like serving women from humbled countries look in films on TV.’ We’re already getting clues. The women’s dowdy uniform is different from that of the men and boys, which is ‘more casual. Their uniform was designer jeans and white T-shirts made of stuff that was better than what ordinary T-shirts get made of.’ So, less than halfway through page 1, there are already alarm bells ringing. We’ve all read The Handmaid’s Tale—you can’t get more ‘cloistery’ than the women’s clothes in the near future of that novel—and in English cities we’re used to seeing casual young men with their cloistery-dressed wives pushing prams. There are religious and cultural reasons for that—but what is Ali Smith signalling? Why do the owners want ‘humbled’-looking women serving?

We don’t immediately get any of it, because Ali Smith is careful not to let us have too much information at once. Like, what the situation is with their mother in this new role? She is covering for her sister, who isn’t well, because it appears that this is the only way she can keep the job. More alarm bells ring, to do with job security and the gig economy that more and more people are having to work in even in our own time. Later in the chapter—I’ve read eight or nine unnumbered chapters so far— Bri notes the strange otherness of the privileged classes dining there. ‘It was like they all had their backs to me, even the ones facing me. Their disconnect was what elegant meant. Like something vital had been withdrawn from them, for its own protection maybe? maybe surgically, the withdrawal of the too-much-life from people who could afford it….’

I won’t need to go into this much detail for the rest of these chapters. Through carefully-laid hints and nudges, we soon understand that the things we notice in the first chapter are part of a grim picture. The sense of division between an elite and the rest of us, a growing phenomenon in the West already, is hardening in Briar’s world. So is the shabbiness of the world that ordinary people like theirs—the siblings have a stand-in father for now, Leif, but by the third or fourth chapter he’s gone, leaving tinned supplies for a week and a small roll of banknotes, and they wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he never came back.

I called this ‘Bri’s world’, because theirs is the only voice we’re hearing. (I’m using the they/them pronoun because Ali Smith has been careful to keep their gender ambiguous.) It’s Smith’s world as well, of course, a plausible near future mostly based on what we already know. But not entirely. The divisions in society hinted at in Bri’s carefully nuanced descriptions of their mother’s uniform and the ‘elegance’ of the elites are given a far mor direct form when the family arrive home. Leif has driven them in the beaten-up old camper van Bri loves—memories of happier times—and they discover a freshly-painted red line surrounding the house they live in. This stark intrusion must be part of a new normal, as we’ve recently started calling the weirdness of changes in Western society. They all know that they can’t live there any more, so they pack what they can and leave for ‘another town.’

Locations, distances, topography…. Smith keeps it all as vague as things were in the first chapter. (What on earth is the ‘docking gate’ near the hotel? It sounds science fictiony, as Bri might describe it—and there aren’t any in the places where ordinary people live.) We can’t picture the house they’ve left, or the roads they travel on, as though Smith deliberately has Bri omit any helpful details. They are hugely perceptive and good with words—Smith likes precocious young people, usually girls, who I always suspect to be clones of her own younger self—so if things aren’t described there might well be an authorial reason for it. Maybe this world doesn’t need to be specific, it’s an archetype. Maybe we’re to think of places we know, slightly altered…

…but it’s early days yet, and a few things have been happening. And we start to get a kind of back-story. Both their mother and Leif sound like the kinds of people who read novels like this, or like we think we are, questioning things as they are and wondering whether they might ever be better. Smart phones are a thing, of course, and Bri describes how some parts of their digital version of reality might be unreliable. On the way back to the camper van, parked well away from the expensive part of town in the first chapter, Bri tells us even Google streetmaps are tricky now. ‘It was easier to navigate by the shops than by the streets so we went towards Chanel instead, biggest thing on the map. Now Gucci. Now Nike. Strange when we finally found the far side where Alana’s flat was, a place not even registering on Google as a place.’ Alana is their mother’s sister.

But I was supposed to be telling you the plot. When they have reached the town they are travelling to, the camper van breaks down, probably for good. They find a Tesco’s to buy supplies, and Leif disappears to talk to somebody who knows of somewhere where they might stay. It’s an entirely empty house—Smith’s always careful with her fictional houses—and Leif leaves them there. Bri is nominally in charge, but both of them have been brought up to be independent and Rose often does what she wants. And their mother liked to keep the use of phones to a minimum. If Bri wanted to look something up, her mother would tell her that’s what libraries are for. Bri wonders if she knows what the few remaining libraries are like now, full of computers. Maybe this is the unstated reason why Smith has made them so good with words. They know how to engage with reality, and are good at finding the right words to describe it.

On their first or second day in the new house, they walk out and discover a field with horses grazing. ‘Seven horses, small and large, all the colours of horse, beautiful and mangy, were drifting their noses across grass and ripping it with their teeth from the ground making a sound I’d never heard before.’ This is Bri’s world, a mixture of intense observation and take-it-or-leave-it Briarisms like ‘the colours of horse.’ It’s a given that we don’t need any more detail than that. It’s like the look of women in humbled countries in the first chapter. We get it.

Next. A question for our age: what’s missing from digital pictures? Answer, for Bri, any sense that these are unmanipulated versions of visual reality. In the near future, nobody really expects photographs to be digitally untouched—so when they examine the happy family in a generic image on the house-key’s key-ring, they are suspicious. Is it AI? ‘There was no such thing as AI children. You were either an alive one, or someone who’d once been a child and was now older, or a dead one; even if the children in the photo were advertising models – which did seem most likely the more I thought about it – then they were still children, or they’d been children once. Well, provided they weren’t invented by a computer collating thousands of digital images down into one single child then another and another, people who’d never existed.’

This is Ali Smith at her most questioningly curious. But it’s Bri who is nostalgic for the photographs of her mother’s, the ones you know weren’t some digital soup of images. Would it be possible to use some of the money to go back to their old house and… and what? Discover a new family living there? Or find it as empty as the one they’re now camping in? What would be the use—and besides, train prices are so expensive a ticket would cost half the money Leif has left them. While in this other part of the town, Bri sees something strange, and meets someone who, to the reader, has the air of an older version of their mother….

There’s a workman using a machine for painting red lines around an old building, with the mock-jaunty name Supera bounder. Smith makes the encounter do a lot of work. First, there’s the 79-year-old woman who tries to stop the man in his tracks as he paints. She partially succeeds, although none of the gathering group of people helps her. The man lets go of the machine and rugby-tackles her to the ground, but the machine is still on and it trundles off-course. Bri can’t help but tip it over, and ‘voluminous redness’ flows down the pavement and on to the road. A car swerves around the pool of red paint. ‘A woman on a bike guided her bike round the red like it had always been there.’ Yep, that’s what we do with these unexpected, unplanned obstacles. We’re used to it by now.

This is already a world we recognise as ours. The man had told the old woman straight away, ‘Doing my job. What I’m paid to. Don’t mess with me.’ He’s mortified when the machine goes over, because it’s no doubt the only job he can get and now he’ll be sacked. This is how 21st Century capitalism works, Smith is telling us. How does the man put it to the old woman? ‘It belongs to the people who’ve bought it, he said. They decide, not me. Not you, lady.’ In the near future, things haven’s actually moved that far. Property is property, and the owners feel they need to protect it by whatever means they like. Maybe they will pay a nominal fee for disfiguring the environment. They won’t notice it.

The woman is still very strong and active, and catches up with Bri: ‘Wait for me, you little revolutionary.’ And they have an Ali Smith-style chat, about names—‘Briar… You don’t seem the overly thorny type to me’—and cultural references, how to dodge the almost ubiquitous surveillance cameras…. The woman is Oona, a name that Bri is so polite about the woman remarks on it. But Oona isn’t polite about the folk song that gave Briar and Rose their names. ‘Piece of pure historical gender-pressurizing.’ She carries on, sounding like another Ali Smith self-portrait, and Bri carries on being the precocious younger one, trying out language like other kids try out new apps. ‘Do you believe me?’ Oona asks. ‘I’ll reserve judgement for now if you don’t mind and tell you later in our relationship,’ says Bri. And as they part company, we wonder when we will see Oona again.

Bri returns to find a pile of messy buttercups on the floor next to an opened window. Rose has been removing them from the field so that the horses’ mouths won’t be inflamed by them. A boy from the farm has told her, but the horses, Bri notices, avoid them anyway. They decide to help Rose, the horses grazing around them indifferently.

The second half of Horse

A new chapter opens with Bri trying to remember where a phrase came from, that they had used with Oona: ‘render us temporary.’ It’s their mother’s phrase, and Bri describes a time when they would overhear her and Leif talking seriously in their bedroom. ‘– group of people, Leif was saying, decides to [  ] another group of people it’s usually to show off their power to themselves via the people they’ve designated as [  ]. And if [  ] can be made to feel, as you put it, temporary—’ This is very Ali Smith, not only evoking Bri’s hesitant accumulation of understanding, but also the politically activist mindset they were raised in. At the time, presumably not long ago, Bri had borrowed the laptop to search for the meanings of ‘render’—a word that Smith has echoing through the text from now on.

The phrase reflects Bri’s growing realisation that the situation they are in is transient, interim—but between what and what? A couple of chapters later, after a description of a day at the temporary house, we get this: ‘So I’ve spent the last five years of my life not letting myself think any of this. Occasionally though, over this time, a sharp-edged piece of it surfaced in me anyway, like a pottery fragment of something….’ Five years. Bri is looking back to this brief interlude, and… is it of value? Or not? ‘Rubbish? or keepsake? the thought of my sister shaking me awake [to clear buttercups] that might be harmful to horses, horses she didn’t yet know were only there to be butchered, so that those horses wouldn’t eat them by mistake and do damage to their soft mouths.’ We don’t find out until later how different Bri’s life is now, why this memory seems so strange.

The chronology becomes less straightforward now. Bri’s clear admiration of the way their mother brought them up comes in the context of a time when, they discover, children rely on smartwatch-style ‘educators’ for everything they learn. Their mother’s ideas were old school. Learning through questioning, experience, and face-to-face interaction with other people—although they seem to have been educated at home—are the things that make both Briar and Rose different from the others.

There are developments. The farmer’s son, if that’s what he is, is Colon—they decide to call him Colin—and he’s much more suspicious of Bri than he had been of Rose. It doesn’t compute for him that neither of them knows anything about the regimented digital world he thought everyone was a part of. He can’t imagine that their mother kept them away from it all, and feels he has to explain about the educator on his wrist. The siblings are highly sceptical, especially when they realise he knows nothing of what their mother taught them about, even recent times. Taylor Swift? (That was what Rose had called herself the day before.) The Beatles? Anything at all before the digitally calibrated present? Nope. But he does know about what happens to UVs like they appear to be, the Unverifiables. He, or his brother more likely, describes a punitive, stratified society that’s a mixture of Brave New World and 1984. Except now, if you can avoid the cameras, Big Brother is on your wrist too.

Meanwhile, Rose continues to surprise Bri. Colon’s older brother, something of a bully, has told her what Bri hasn’t, that these ‘abattoir horses’—Bri hadn’t corrected her when she thought it was simply a breed—are being fattened up to be have a bolt-gun pressed to their heads. He has told her in detail what happens after that, and she is revolted by it. Some of the meat is passed for human consumption, and she becomes convinced the cheap meatballs Leif bought will be mainly horsemeat. She persuades Bri to help her and Colon—he seems to be on their side now—to free the horses. More than that, she wants to use their money to buy Gliff, her favourite. Ah.

And this is what they end up doing. By the last chapter of Horse, Gliff is inside the house, as we learn when Bri decides to let Oona know about their plan. The day after the Supera bounder incident, and on the next two days after that, Bri waits in the same spot until she sees Oona again. The old woman is well-practised in the skills of avoiding the cameras: ‘Did you know you can talk to someone without moving your lips very much?’. As I’ve already suggested, she seems to be an older version of Bri, or their mother, or Ali Smith… and I think she’s going to have a more important role yet. But…

…I need to rewind again. I told you the chronology becomes less predictable, and there’s a chapter set five years later and told in the present tense. Now, Bri is a part of the Big Brother system. Ali Smith never calls it that, of course, because she doesn’t have to. By the age of eighteen Bri’s job is to ensure that workers on a zero-skill production line don’t mess up. Smith makes it shocking because she’s so matter-of-fact about it. There’s been an unacceptable incident on the line, and a girl of about seventeen is brought before Bri. She recognises that Bri must be related to Rose, and describes how she knows her. Bri’s response, after five years of learning how to behave in the sightline of the cameras, is to affect bafflement. Instead of any human response, she stonewalls the girl. She ignores the fact that one of her hands is a stump following an industrial accident—nobody has ever admitted liability, of course—and recites the standard warning about salary loss and ‘re-education.’

But there’s something important about this encounter. The girl describes her time as an unverifiable, a serial user, ‘taking whatever I could get whenever I could get it, anything, we all were. Except her, she never took anything. We were holed up in the same cave, seven of us, we were there for quite a few weeks. I have to tell you. One of the people I most loved that I ever met. When someone’s spirit never gutters.’ But that’s not all. She uses the word: ‘Gliff. The word unbalances me so much I nearly fall forward into the fast flow of pickled vegetables rolling through on the Belt.’ So this is what has forced Bri to remember this time with the empty house and the horse—and how only Rose seemed to have any idea about what to do. Perhaps Rose, always drug-free at the cave, managed not to be rounded up with the others.

Whatever, at the end of the conversation Bri tells the girl she’s met the criteria for receiving a painkiller. ‘I place the painkiller in her hand. It’s a double. This is because the doubles are big enough to write on. I am hoping her eyesight is still good enough. She looks down at it, nods a thanks. I don’t know whether this means she’s read what’s on it or not.’ What’s going on? We know from earlier in the novel that whistleblowing notes are sometimes smuggled out of factories, and we wonder if Bri’s message might lead to something in this five-years-hence present.

Back in the main timeline, there are more hints of some form of dissidence. After watching the well-publicised efficiency of the razing of the old building—it had been a popular theatre and centre for local events—Bri notices a girl of about sixteen disappearing through a five-metre-high fence. It’s covered in details of the punishments handed out to trespassers, but Bri follows her anyway. Across a grassy park, there’s a former school, but the girl becomes threatening, and Bri leaves. But later, during an April heatwave—climate change is another thing Ali Smith needs to tick off her list, I guess—Bri and Rose are back there keeping cool. There’s a strange episode with a woman, formally a famous philosopher but now stateless and homeless, talking to them about a strange Stubbs painting of a horse frightened by a lion. (It must be a version of this one.)

Enough? I realise I haven’t mentioned their mother’s job before Rose was born, writing publicity material for a sociopathic weedkiller company. A whistleblower tells her to leave, because the product is dreadfully dangerous to life, especially unborn children like hers. The company lays people off, including their mother, because of the bad publicity and, supposedly, more expensive manufacturing practices. Is there anything at all in Smith’s future world that doesn’t feel as though it’s being run by sociopaths? Has she been reading too much news?

Power

This is half the length of Horse, and it definitely isn’t all about the plot. Sure, we find out how Bri came to be working in a quality control office whilst Rose definitely didn’t, but the main events unfold with an unsurprising inevitability. The former school is a hideout for unverifiables, including Oona, and the storming of their little haven, not very long after Bri and Rose have moved in with Gliff, is exactly as you would expect. But in this section, Power, it’s the way Smith tells it that counts. She seems much more interested in the forms that her story can take, and in language itself. The first chapter, entirely in italics, is a fairytale of a girl born with a horse’s head, and a mystical ability to bring comfort. She can see beyond what humans can see, but this doesn’t come out through speech. Her calm, all-knowing presence is enough. Unlike Swift’s Houyhnhnms, definitely a subliminal reference here, this creature needs no language. But all the inherent goodness is there…. Unexpectedly, the fairytale ends with the natural world in a kind of cosmic revolt against humanity’s depredations:

The mountainous movement across the earth made a clamour so huge and so righteous that it gathered everything true to it, and it always will, the great grey mountain of mistreatment and misuse, and it’s still doing that work for the people and the things of the world robbed of what and who they are, it’s still furious at that robbery, it’s still moving, still growing, still gathering even more strength and still rolling forward like an avalanche, listen, hear that rumbling noise underneath and over everything? gathering and rolling forward to wherever it’s most needed?

Like the horse-headed girl, Rose can get by without words. We see it in stark contrast with Bri, who becomes fascinated by the former school library’s dictionaries—I’ll come back to that—whereas Rose communicates with Gliff without words. And, when they need to escape, she has an instinct for riding bareback. She conveys her intentions almost magically with the horse, and Bri, sitting behind her, asks her how. ‘Easy… I’m an animal,’ and they ride to the station. Their journey home isn’t by train, but alongside the tracks. They meet enough helpful people on the way back to their old town that they reach it—only to discover their house is gone. It’s a kind of airbrushing of history. First the red paint lines appear, then everything inside them is gone, pfft. And the same day…

…so is Bri, efficiently and brutally captured. There’s nothing surprising about it, but Smith does what she can to make it distinctive. The oven-hot journey, with Bri being thrown about in the back of an empty van, is given a vividness through Bri’s description of the harsh details. This is interspersed with thoughts of Rose: ‘there was nothing for me to hold on to. Nothing but this: / she’d wait until late then sneak out of the [neighbours’] shed when she saw them switching their lights off and going to bed; or she’d leave it long enough for them to be asleep before she made the move….’ Bri is vetted at some nameless venue, and is told there will be assessment followed by retraining. Luckily, Bri appears to have something of value to these people, which must be why we saw them as a ‘superior’—still a cog in the machine, but telling others what to do—in Horse. Meanwhile, they’ve been imagining a whole escape for Rose, culminating at the end of this Power section.

‘In my head through all of it a wide open landscape and a horse crossing it through the rain, faster than the rain, leaving the rain behind fast like speeded-up film footage from wars in history and my sister so steadfast on that horse’s back that they’d melded into one single form’—and so on, until the horse is Pegasus and unstoppable.

Running alongside all this, is Smith’s focus on language. Not since Anna in Smith’s 2011 novel There but for the has there been such a word-fixated character as Bri (and yes, I might be wrong—word-fixation is a thing for Ali Smith), and their discovery of the school library, with a whole wall of dictionaries, is perfect. There seems to be the complete OED, because gliff is in there, offering far more than the online dictionary they’d looked at earlier. Bri copies all the definitions in pencil, to show to Rose. The details aren’t important, but Bri’s conclusion about words definitely is: ‘there was such a thing as a family of words, one that stretched across different languages all touching on each other, hitting or striking each other, acting on each other, influencing each other, agreeing with each other or throwing each other out, disturbing each other, doing all of these things at once.’ It sounds like a manifesto for Ali Smith herself…

…as in, why has she chosen such a word as Gliff for her title? Bri explains the list of definitions to Rose. ‘You’ve named him a word that doesn’t just mean so many things, it can also mean all of them and none of them at once. I pointed to the list. / And even more – one of its meanings is, here, see? – a substitute word for any word – you’ve given him a name that can stand in for, or represent, any other word, any word that exists. Or ever existed. Or will. Because of what you called him, he can be everything and anything. And at the same time his name can mean nothing at all. It’s like you’ve both named him and let him be completely meaning-free!’

That explanation is enough for me. But Rose, not such a word-hoarder, is no more excited than you would expect. ‘Oh, she said. Right.’ For Rose, like the horse-headed girl in the fairytale, it’s the unspoken that counts. OK, this is all very interesting—anyone who’s a fan of Ali Smith is going to be a fan of words, so it’s bound to be—but she’s doing something else here. In this control-fixated world, words, just like ‘gliff’, can mean anything and nothing. Usually nothing, like the ‘Supera bounder’ name and Bri’s robotic delivery of information to the woman who recognises them. Oh, and the thugs who process Bri, after they finally prise the made-up name ‘Allendale’ from them, decide Bri is male. ‘Wasn’t so hard. Was it. Right. Dale. Alan. Now. Sit down, Alan, till I find you on the system.’ if they knew Bri’s real details, would they find anything on their system? Possibly not… and Rose had always said that Bri, mysteriously expert with tech, would be the one to keep them off it. I wonder….

Lines—to the end

Yep, that’s exactly what Bri does, near the end of this final section. We already know about those mysterious tech skills, and we also know about that Road to Damascus moment when the girl with the missing hand starts talking about Rose. That conversation seems to have pulled Bri’s head out of its five-year zombie state as a part of the corporate machine—which explains why Bri has been remembering the events we’ve been reading about. And, reader, in this section we find out it isn’t going to stop there. Ali Smith resorts to a trope beloved of novelists who want to bring about some magical riposte to injustice, the tech-related superpower. When Elspeth uses hers towards the end of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I wrote: ‘Basically, she waves her magic wand, or snaps her Super-computer-woman fingers, and Pouf!’ Which is exactly what Bri does. It doesn’t only cause all sorts of grief to the bosses’ systems, it gives a lot of people at the bottom of the heap impossible promotions, to a much more liberally-run sector of the corporation. Bless.

But all that comes later. First, Bri needs to know more about Rose and that cave. Luckily, for its own nefarious reasons, the company has created ‘voids’ in its surveillance systems. It means that operatives with the power can do what they like in these areas, as Bri has discovered. ‘Over the past few years, most often at the start when I was still apparently fresh enough, I was repeatedly brought to various voids by men and women more powerful than me.’ Thanks, Ali, we get it. Whatever, Bri takes the girl with only one hand—she’s called Ayesha—to one of the voids and starts to ask questions. Ayesha’s story is part of the reason why I found this whole final section the least interesting of all.

There’s been a fantastical edge to the whole novel, with that italicised horse-headed girl story coming at the half-way point. Despite some gritty details of horrific working conditions and lethal corporate responses to anyone who doesn’t conform, in Ayesha’s story Smith seems to have lost interest in assembling a plausible-seeming near future. Several pages of her narrative, italicised like the horse-head story, consist of a story Rose told them, before they knew who she was. It’s about a tyrant, and is a variant of Poe’s ‘The Tell-tale Heart’. A nasty boss-man has somebody killed, and can’t ever rid himself of the taint of the man’s ashes he thinks he has adhering to him. But this is a call to hope. If you try to disperse the ashes into the air, or the ocean, they don’t disappear. ‘His opponent is lapping at the side of his boat, at the side of his dock. His opponent is the water. His opponent is the air. His opponent isn’t just this world. His opponent is the universe.’ Is this the story of a seer? Or of a nine- or ten-year-old child? I couldn’t possibly comment.

Was Smith ever really interested in a plausible near-future? I found myself thinking about The Hunger Games, in which a frankly ludicrous dystopia—it isn’t a novel meant for grown-ups—is navigated by a strong girl using her own author-given powers. In the sequels she does her damnedest to overturn the bloated hegemony, and maybe she even succeeds—I didn’t read that far. And I feel we’re in the same territory in this novel. By the time Ayesha has finished her story, every last scale has fallen from Bri’s eyes—five years of loving Big Brother is enough for anyone. Returning to the office with Ayesha, having disabled the cameras, Bri gives her all the medication she has access to, and papers to qualify her for a good job in a nice company. ‘The pay is better, the hours are laxer, the food is healthier, the accommodation is communal and high end, the team is friendly.’ Bless.

And, after performing all those clever hacking manoeuvres, learnt over five years of self-teaching, it’s time for a calm exit. Ayesha will be living in Bri’s flat now—another farewell gift—because Bri won’t be needing it any more. Because—what? It’s time to be the worm that turned. Left with almost nothing, it’s time to start wandering and hope something turns up. How does it go? ‘If I don’t find somewhere to shelter I’ll let the weather have me. Whatever. On the way to whatever, one of the things I’m bound to pass is a field that’s got horses in it out in the weather too, white, brown, black, grey, all the colours of horse. They’ll be massive and delicate, strong as horses. I know how to hold my arm out with my hand open towards them. Maybe one or two of them will see me do this, raise their heads, maybe even start to cross that field towards me.’ And that’s the end of Bri…

…but not the end of the novel. It’s time for the old Ctrl-I trick again, as we’re in the strange world that is, as far as I can tell, the inside of Rose’s head just after Bri’s arrest. She is, she reminds herself, an eleven-year-old girl on a horse as her chapter opens with a childish memory of their mother’s ‘monkey’ trick to get them quiet, and how this once made her and Bri lapse into pretend monkey language instead. How they had laughed. But this is now, at the empty space where the neighbours have put in a big new window where the party wall used to be. A perfume-bottle top in the neighbour’s bin brings another memory, her mother’s smell, and she thinks about how defiant she would have been now: whatever’s stopping her, there will be no stopping her.

And this sets the tone for eight pages of Rose’s own defiance. Is it another trope, the strong girl, triumphing over anything that comes her way? All we actually see is her threatening to throw a stone at the big window, then using the unspoken bond between herself and Gliff to get the better of Colin, the boy who sold him to them. He’s here to demand the rest of the money, but she says she’ll have to give him back instead. Colin can’t do anything but try to lead him off—and gets dragged in the mud instead. She helps him, folding the scrap of paper with Bri’s ‘Gliff’ definitions mostly washed off—clunky metaphor alert—to scrape some mud from him. He decides to be a follower, and Rose looks back to him and the horse. We’ll be making it up as we go, you tell them both over your shoulder.

Satisfactory? A message of hope? You decide.