Ada was twelve when her mother killed the dog. She was relieved when it died. It made her realize that life wasn’t for everyone.
It was a golden retriever with soft curly hair. Her mother bought it after Ada’s father moved out, to replace him. She named it Faustus. It quickly became clear there was something wrong with him. He sat beneath the radiator in the kitchen and barked all night, from when Ada’s mother turned out the lights to when she came back downstairs in the morning. Whenever anybody tried to touch him, he shook as if he was terrified. But he was always trying to be touched, and he suffered from incessant digestive issues. If he was left alone, he ate everything he had access to—edible or otherwise—and then hid in shame beneath Ada’s bed.
Ada’s mother decided that he was jealous. She turned the space under the stairs into a miniature version of their living room, with a green velvet sofa meant for children and small Persian rug. On the wall she stuck printouts of the same art reproductions that hung over the fireplace. It was fenced in by a baby gate. For one night Faustus was happy and didn’t bark.
“All he needed,” Ada’s mother said, “was to feel included.”
Two days later a builder came to repair a crack in the ceiling. Faustus ate a tube of ceiling glue left in his tool kit and ran out the open front door into the bright, sunny street. He was found three days later by a friend of Ada’s mother, running along the concrete path above the pebbled beach. He had apparently not stopped running the entire time. The pads of his feet were worn down to bloody open sores. Ada’s mother told her he had been sent away to live with a couple she had met in line at the pharmacy.
When Ada heard the news, she knew that the dog was dead, and she knew that her mother had killed it out of pity, because both of them knew that he shouldn’t have to suffer by living in torment. A few years later she passed a woman with a golden retriever on a leash who strained towards her as if in recognition, but even though the dogs looked exactly alike, she knew they weren’t the same.
*
Ada had a secret that she had never told anyone. There were things she knew that she should have had no way of knowing. Sometimes a voice spoke to her and told her things that she knew to be true by the way they fit in with what was happening around her. It told her that her mother had killed the dog. It didn’t tell her how it had happened, just that it had. It made sense because Ada knew her mother couldn’t bear it that the dog was always suffering.
“He’s soaked up all the misery in the house,” her mother said, “like a sponge. But he doesn’t know how to get rid of it.”
Ada thought she was wrong. Faustus had been unhappy before he had reached them. There was something wrong with him: he was defective, as if he’d been manufactured incorrectly. One time Ada had tried to trim the curly hair that was always in his eyes. At the last second he had jerked away from her, and the scissors had left a long gash down the side of his face. He hadn’t made a sound but had looked at her sideways so that she could see the white parts around his eyes, and afterwards he left the room whenever she came in. Ada was sure that he had done it on purpose.
Her mother was a lawyer, and her father was an IT technician. They had met at university in Leeds and moved to the countryside outside of Norwich when Ada was born. The house they lived in bordered the marshes, and in the summer they went swimming in the tidal inlets. Ada’s mother swam every day, all year round. When the tides were inconvenient, she swam in water so shallow that the front of her body became covered in mud and silt. Sometimes her father took photographs of the rusty tin-roofed barn in the field next door. Several of these photographs hung on the wall in the kitchen, above the stove. He always photographed the barn at the same angle, but the distance from which he took the pictures varied.
When Ada was eleven, the voice told her that her parents were getting a divorce. She was sitting at the kitchen counter waiting for her mother to come home. At first she thought the voice had come out of the radio, but then she realized it was inside her head, as if somebody had put it there. It surprised her that she hadn’t thought about her parents’ marriage before. When she came home from school, the house was always empty. Her father spent all his time in the basement, and her mother came home after it was dark. Ada didn’t know where her mother went, only that when she came back, she was cold and silent. The tips of her fingers would turn white, and then red as they warmed up. The only thing Ada could think of to explain it was that she had been standing alone on the beach, watching the ocean. That day on the way home from school Ada had seen her black coat flapping around her in the wind as she stared out at the rough gray water.
Ada didn’t know what to do on her own in the house, apart from wait for somebody to come back. It always seemed too dark, even when she turned on all the lights, partly because the walls of the living room were painted a deep maroon. It was like everybody in the world had disappeared and she was the only one left. If her father took too long she would start to believe that she was disappearing as well. She was sitting very still in the kitchen, aware of her mother through the wall, facing away from her and across the blank sea. It was like she was a vacuum, an object in the shape of a person. She couldn’t move. Then she heard the voice, and it was like a door swung open inside her head. Through it she could see a black tunnel, like a mine shaft, stretching down inside her. That night, she dreamt she saw her mother walk forwards into the water until she disappeared under the waves. Ada got up very early, before anyone else was awake, and found her mother’s coat, stiff and wet, hanging over the edge of the bath.
The next day Ada fell down the stairs and broke her wrist on the stone paving of the hallway. There was nobody at home, and she waited on the cold floor, thinking about her mother. She wondered how loud she would have to scream for her mother to hear her, but she knew there was no noise she could make that would be loud enough, so she stayed silent. She didn’t think to call her father, who would be on the way home. When he arrived, he found her lying in the same position she had fallen in. He asked her why she hadn’t gotten up to call for help.
“I wanted someone to find me,” she said.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I don’t understand.” He drove her to the hospital without saying anything else.
From the top of the stairs it had looked like a red carpet extended all the way to the opposite side of the wall, sealing over the gap where the staircase had been, but when she stepped forwards there was nothing to support her. She spent the night in the hospital. Both of her parents stayed in the room. It was the last time that they were all together. When they got home, Ada’s father sat both of them down in the living room and told them that he was moving out. He left the same day. Ada remembered noticing that her wrist didn’t hurt at all. Two days later her mother bought the dog, driving to Wales to pick it up from a breeder who told them that both of its parents were unusually sensitive and intelligent.
There was no reason for the voice not to be real. Ada imagined a satellite transmitting information directly into her head. Somebody must be responsible. As well as the voice, she had a lump in the back of her mouth, where her soft palate met the opening of her throat. She assumed it was some kind of implant. Her parents had never noticed it. Since whoever sent her the information knew so much about her, more than she knew about herself, she assumed that they were always watching her, wherever she went. They could see inside her head. Nothing was private. It was comforting to think that she was never alone. Although she waited for it, thinking something else would surely have to come, nothing more happened until she met Atticus.
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From The Body Builders by Albertine Clarke. Used with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury. Copyright © 2026 by Albertine Clarke .