Like all the other days, I fill the oil burners, then shower in silence. Breakfast to the crunch of my cereal and Splinter’s dry food. There’s no smell of toast or citrus body cream and shampoo, no one to kiss the top of my head and tell me to buy milk or bread or juice on the way home. To get annoyed at my dawdling. It’s the missing sounds that make my ears hurt. I pick up my bag and leave for school.

DAY 28

SATURDAY

THAT FIRST WEEKEND is just a head-echo: snippets of the house, Splinter and closed curtains. My brain was working so hard to stay upright I reckon it didn’t have room to lay down memories as well.

I have flashes of the Sunday night: packing my schoolbag, setting my alarm for the morning, standing in the shower till there was no hot water. I remember waking up on the couch, the cold of wet hair making my brain ache, the rest of me sweating under the heat of my duvet, your duvet and Splinter. Then I went to school. I slipped Schoolkid on like a jumper, without thinking. Slipped into it and didn’t need to think. Home’s different, though.

The second weekend I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I stayed inside with the door locked, sitting in a sickly fug of clove and pine that was meant to relieve winter nervous tension. Splinter paced and I watched TV. TV’s rubbish, isn’t it? You always said that. Especially in the daytime, though I watched it at night too. All the stuff you hate most. Soapies, cop shows, adult stuff. The ads were too loud and too bright and they woke me when I’d fallen asleep, the sound pushing through my eyeballs and squeezing my brain. I mostly leave the volume off now, except for ABC News 24. That’s all finance, indexes and random babble, or it’s about kids whose lives are falling apart. Bombs. Gas. Fires. Sometimes I cry. Mostly it makes me feel a bit better.

I didn’t go far at first. There was an invisible elastic pulling at my middle: I didn’t want to be near, but I couldn’t go far. So I stayed inside, walked Splinter round the corner for a wee and a sniff and went to the gas station for bread, sliced cheese and quick noodles. Eventually the elastic loosened. My range slipped beyond school and shops. The further I went the looser the elastic became until, somewhere around Stony Creek Backwash, it fell away.