I had a book once, when I was little, and for a tiny sliver of my tiny life, it was my world.

Perhaps it was a birthday present, or maybe because I was good and didnt cry on an endless expedition to Marks and Spencer, or even just because. And it was wonderful.

But then I lost it, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldnt find it again.

I told myself that it was good that it had gone, because the pictures scared me. Later, in my searches for the title, I never found anything that evoked the dread of those sketches. They seemed crude, medieval, muted, and yet, on winter nights snuggled in the depths of my duvet, they seemed very much to be perfect records, like photographs of a place and time that no longer existed in this world.

But no matter how many times I told myself I was better off without it, I was never quite convinced.

The animals were wild, and yet had a ferocious civility about them as they trod through snow to their homes in the village, ascended their stairs in night caps with candles held ahead in one paw to chase the shadows from their realm and mine.

And that was important, because there were shadows. School. The incident in the park. Mum crying on the garage floor. The blood. But nothing could hurt me when faced with that badger. You could see it in his eyes.

He was my protector. The fox in his tunic, expertly poised on his armchair by the fire, my trusted advisor. He knew everything. He'd seen it all before, and my troubles were nothing compared to what he'd faced.

My beloved hare was next, all twirled whiskers and flowing gowns, ready to comfort me when my mother could not. Everything would work out in the end, her trembling, twitching embrace assured, and I spent whole nights curled in the safety of her burrow, though the blankets itched and the howls of hungry wolves squirmed between the broken boards in the pantry wall. But it would be alright.

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The mice, gathered solemnly in their isolated church on the hill, kept watch for all between their hushed masses. The merry playing of the green, beady-eyed newt on her piano trickled from the tavern down the lane back to the moonwashed houses of my companions, but not once did I go in, because dad told me never to take a drink in places like that. And the downy moles, three a page, nuzzled against my ear from their stern manor at the very end and whispered of the good things to come.

There was a story, on each left page, something about a well and a festival, but I have long forgotten that. I only heard it a few times. When I took myself to bed, I looked only at the pictures, and let my friends tuck me in.

It was a vital part of my existence, one I could not have lived without, and sometimes, on very special nights, a certain weightlessness would come over me, and I would wake knowing I would not hear beyond my door, for in the darkness, so close, the expectant rustling of the gathered villagers in their vigil would keep everything else at bay. The fevered warmth of their musky bodies, somewhere just there outside of the filtered orange swell of the nightlight, banished any chill.

And now it is I who rises slowly to my bedroom on a cold, windy night, not in a snow-blanketed village but in the long, uneasy street of a sleepless town. The noise outside is the cackling of the strangers stumbling out of the bar across the road at closing time. Tonight, there is the smashing of glass, and the crying of a woman, and the thin railing shriek of a car alarm. My torchlight is from my phone, illuminating the sodden corridor in front of me, the detritus of my wanderings piled on either side. My night cap is a tumbler of whisky, full to the brim.

And in the spotlight I run one careless hand over one more cardboard box, and an encyclopaedia falls softly in the dust of the carpet and opens to a long-outdated page on space travel, and there it is, after all this time, all my friends, and I pick it up and fumble at the glossy edges of the pages, and pause, and run one puzzled finger across the price sticker attached to the front of the unopened cellophane wrapper, and treasure the moment I never knew I was waiting for.