My name is Astrid Hardiwicke. I am ten and three-quarter years old and the doctor says I won't ever be eleven. He thought I couldn't hear him when he said that, but I could hear him. It's okay, though, I knew. They still keep treating me like I don't know.

I am with my Friend above the ballroom. We're sitting on the gallery, even though I'm in my pyjamas. It's okay, I'm allowed to. Mum and Dad know. You can't get onto this gallery except through the secret door in my bedroom. It's my gallery. It's ours, me and my Friend. My house is full of secret doors and hallways and nobody except me knows them properly.

And my Friend, too, she knows them all. Because I know them, she knows them.

There's a ball on tonight. There's a ball on nearly every night. All the men are very handsome and wearing shiny dark suits, and all the women are dancing with them in beautiful gowns covered in lace and jewels. Me and my friend sit up here almost every night and watch them whirling around the floor, all glamorous and exciting. Mum and Dad put the balls on because they know I like to watch them and because I won't ever be eleven and because I'm sick and I'm not allowed to dance. Mum and Dad don't really dance except sometimes. They sit at the wall.

There are other dancers who don't actually dance.

The ballroom is made of marble. It used to be one big block of marble and they hollowed out the middle. Mr Hannigan told me that. The gallery me and my Friend are sitting on is carved out of the marble, and all the tables and chairs and the little stage for the band below are carved out of the marble.

So are the other guests at the ball.

Even when there is nobody in the ballroom, it looks like there's a party. Because there are beautiful statues, a whole neighbourhood of them and they look just like real people. Some are in pairs and posed for the waltz, and there are young ladies grouped in one corner giggling about a gentleman sitting at one of the tables. There is a marble band that sits in amongst the real band, with perfect instruments with their strings and everything. There is a bad man talking to a pretty woman at the other end of the room, and she is blushing rose-stones and leaning away from him. A whole real world carved up around the outside, stone people

My Friend is a stone person.

She sits like me, with her legs out between the posts, watching downstairs. Everybody says she looks like me, but I don't think so, except she has green eyes like me. Mr Hannigan, who is the sculptor and who still lives in our house in his workshop downstairs, says he's very sorry I think that. He says he meant her to look just like me. But I don't think she does at all. Anyway, she can't be me, she's my Friend. And I don't always look sad the way she does. She can't help it because he carved her that way, but she can't smile even if she wants to. And she does sometimes.

When grown-ups talk about her they say they understand. They say she looks absolutely perfectly like a little girl who is longing to join the dance below and isn't allowed. Mr Hannigan smiles when they say that, so I suppose he meant for that to happen. The grown-ups say she looks like me too, which makes him happy, and if I'm there when they say it, he winks at me. Then they say that she is absolutely the finest of the stone people and I agree with them then because she is my Friend.

But tonight she doesn't want to be my friend anymore. She says I was bad and betrayed her. She says I promised never to tell anybody about how me and her can talk to each other sometimes, and how sometimes I feel her in the back of my head when I'm going around the secret house, all the extra trapdoors and corridors. She's right as well, I did promise, but I only told Mr Hannigan, and Mr Hannigan made her, so obviously I thought he knew everything already. I thought he made her that way so she could be my Friend properly and not just be a statue who's supposed to look like me and totally doesn't.

Only now she's not talking to me.

I wasn't even going to tell her about it only Mr Hannigan said something that made me worried and I felt guilty then.

He said he was going to call a doctor. And I have loads of doctors, they come here all the time. There's one coming in the morning and I said he could just wait for that one.

And then Mr Hannigan said it wasn't that kind of doctor. That it wasn't a doctor for me, but a doctor for my Friend. And I thought it was a joke because you can't get a doctor for a stone person because they don't get sick, they don't have proper bodies, and I told her this but she says I still shouldn't have talked about us being able to be proper Friends. She says she doesn't want a doctor and she doesn't need one.

She sounds scared.

She shouldn't be scared. Doctors can't do anything to her. They can't make her say 'Aah' because she can't open her mouth and they can't take blood from her because she doesn't have any. The worst he can do is rap her on the head and she won't even be able to feel that because she's a stone person. And she gets to be eleven, and twelve, and all the other numbers because nothing can ever happen to her.

She's being really stupid, so I'm going to bed. Except when I get up, I have to pull the edge of my pyjama top out of her hand. She does that sometimes. None of the other stone people ever move, but my Friend is special. Sometimes she holds my hand.

'Don't go away,' she says. Only she doesn't make a sound and her lips don't move. I just know she said it. 'I'm not ready yet. We can't let that Doctor come here, Astrid.'