A branch from a tree in the garden bent in and tapped on the bedroom window like a caller asking for admission to the house.

‘Fran? Can you hear me, Fran? Don’t go to him, Fran.’ Tears rolled down her face. ‘Stay with me. I love you, Fran…’

The Past

1979

As she crept down the stairs, moonlight shone through the stained-glass skylight, picking out a path in the darkness for her in amber and red.

With each step, the grandfather clock in the hall hummed and she imagined that in the mechanics inside it there was a real heart, racing at a dozen beats per second like the injured mouse she had found in the garden that morning.

Tiptoeing through the hall in the direction of the kitchen, she felt the vibration of the mouse’s heartbeat in her hands, where she had held it for a long, long time.

Other than the hum and tick-tock of the grandfather clock, the house was plunged into the silence of the dead of night.

In the kitchen, she pondered the silence and realised that her baby brother – not a baby now but eighteen months old, though in her heart he would always be her baby brother – was indeed a very smart cookie.

A very smart cookie? Her infant teacher Miss Slack’s favourite term of praise for children who answered questions correctly, sat up nicely and listened well.

Baby brother had learned a big lesson from his big sister: the total pointlessness of crying.

It was not rewarded with kindness and attention from either mother or father and, very often, provoked the opposite response. Anger.

In her hands she carried a wet nappy. She placed it in the drum of the washing machine, already half full of washing for Mrs Doyle to see to in the morning.

She blew a sigh of relief. No one would notice what she had done for her baby brother just now.

She opened the fridge and was grateful for the outpouring of light from within the chilly box.

She looked up in the general direction of her baby brother’s bedroom and recalled the recent memory of her visit to him.

He had stood at the side of his cot, holding on to the wooden rail, his face and head illuminated by a strand of moonlight that shot through a gap in the curtains.

‘Hungry?’

He had looked at her in a way that needed no language, not that he had that much anyway. She knew. He was starving.

In the kitchen, she poured milk into his drinking cup and screwed on the lipped top of the vessel.

She found biscuits in a tin and hid them in the pockets of her dressing gown.

When she had been with him five minutes earlier, she had lifted him from his cot and felt that he was suddenly much heavier than his normal weight. His nappy was flooded.