The sweetness of the jam has opened a deep, aching hole that cramps inside her. She hasn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. She hasn’t felt like this for years. She might faint, crumple onto the floor and disappear.

That Monday morning, seven years before, she had walked to school slowly. She placed her feet gently, carefully, in her bright red shoes, the ones her mother had stolen for her. She had already dropped Aaron at primary. In their room at the hostel, when they left that morning, her mother had still not returned. She had been gone since Friday night. Rose had bought a pack of biscuits on the way home from school on Friday afternoon. They finished them for breakfast on Sunday.

When their mother wasn’t there, Aaron refused to leave the room. He was scared of the hallway, and the people in the hallway. Rose couldn’t leave him either. If she did he screamed. So they peed in a bucket and poured it out of the window when the coast was clear. If there was a pigeon, they tried to hit it. Once, they got a cat.

She had found that if you walk slowly, you get less dizzy.

At school, she had waited, on the bench, far from the others. She had looked at her feet, red and strange at the end of her legs, and thought of the mad dash down the street, her mother shouting at her to run. She tried to taste again the fizzing cola bottle. She had already checked the bins, but it was Monday morning, and there was nothing to eat in them. She remembers the way the bell rang through her, jangling her teeth. When you’re hungry, the world is either distant or too close. People are ghosts, until they come close, and then their voices pierce you like knives. She waited a moment, as the noise eddied around her. She blinked against it, all these bodies, thick and strong and full of life. She walked to the door of the classroom and then they saw her shoes.

The edge of the door is hard behind her back. The jar is cold in her hand.

They took her to the head teacher. In the corner of the window of Mrs Jackson’s office there had been a small crack like a crooked smile. Rose had stared at it so she didn’t have to look at the plate of custard creams on the desk. She stared until it stared back. The eyes were narrow flecks of paint. It looked like her mother.

Remember me? it said, squinting.

Rose had wobbled for a moment on her heels. One hand reached out, slowly, and her pale fingers touched the edge of the desk to steady herself.

‘Rose?’ said Mrs Jackson.

She had tried to look away, but the wicked little eyes held her.