The If Game by Catherine Storr Page B

side of the world. Who was it he’d said it about? Not himself. Stephen couldn’t for the moment remember, and Alex was asking him something.
    â€˜How do you get through the doors?’
    â€˜I’ve got some keys,’ he said.
    â€˜Like that big one you opened the door with in the end house you said was too thin to be real?’
    â€˜That’s right. I found one when I was digging in the garden.’ He remembered that that was the day he’d first talked to Alex through the shrubs.
    â€˜Did you find the others too?’
    â€˜Mm. I was going to have a sort of collection. And one I was given.’
    â€˜I wonder if they’d work for me? Perhaps I’d find I was in America and Dad was a millionaire.’
    Somehow he was sure his keys wouldn’t work for her.
    She stood up. ‘I’ve got to go now. If you get to that place again, please tell me.’
    â€˜I might.’ But he didn’t mean to.
    â€˜I’d really like to know about it.’
    â€˜How long are you staying here? I mean, with your mum’s uncle?’
    Three more days. Bye. Be seeing you.’ Then she was gone.

15
    Stephen went home. Dad hadn’t got back from work yet, so he had the flat to himself, which was good. He felt as if he had more thinking to do than he’d ever had in his life.
    Suppose Alex was right? He had not wanted to believe her when she’d explained her idea about the ‘If’ game really working, but now that he thought about it again, it did seem possible. Not likely, but just possible. Then that would mean that when he was the other side of one of those doors, he was in Australia, living the other life that he would have lived all the time—If.
    That was the question. If—what? He must find out whether Dad had ever thought of emigrating. And now he remembered what Dad had said about ‘The other side of the world’. It wasn’t about himself. It was about Stephen’s mum’s family. They were the other side of the world. That could be Australia, probably was. That made a sort of crazy sense. He, Stephen, might be living with them instead of with Dad in England. He wondered why they had gone there. He wondered if his mum had gone with them. That might explain why his dad wouldn’t talk about her. If she’d chosen to go and leave him, he wasn’t likely to be thinking of her with much affection. He’d be angry and hurt.
    Stephen knew that he had got to find out about his mum. Whatever had happened, he ought to know. If she was really dead, he wanted to know that too. He had to find out why his dad wouldn’t talk about her. That was theproblem. With any ordinary dad, Stephen thought, he could have asked and been told the truth. But his dad was a clam. He couldn’t be made to talk. And Stephen’s attempt with Aunt Alice had failed. He wondered if there was anyone else who knew the truth and who would be willing to tell him.
    Suppose Alex was right? Suppose that when he went through one of those special doors, he really did find himself living another life which had somehow got bypassed in favour of this one here? The people there must be his mum’s family. All he had to do was to get back there and ask.
    He was surprised to discover how much he didn’t want to. There had been something disagreeable about the occasions on which he’d met those people—a feeling that they wanted to claim more from him than he wanted to give. They assumed that he belonged to them. But he did not belong, either to them or to the places where he saw them. It was like finding that he was wearing the wrong clothes, or even that he had the wrong kind of skin. He wanted to stay where he was, in the life he knew and understood, not to get involved in that other life, with people he felt were strangers.
    He did not have to. And even if he wanted to, he was not sure how to set about it. He would have, he supposed, to go through