Eventually Mum got me a Girl’s World as an outlet for my hair obsession, and I loved it, but Amanda disapproved. She was fiercely serious, not at all into pop music or make-up or fashion or any of the things that I was interested in, and that I was supposedly too young for.

My dad died of a heart attack when I was seven and Amanda was fourteen. A few weeks later, before the funeral, I overheard Mum on the phone, talking to one of her friends. She was singing Amanda’s praises. What a help she’d been, in the last few weeks. What a tower of strength. So grown up, so reliable, mature beyond her years. She really didn’t know what she would have done without her.

She didn’t mention me.

I hadn’t really cried about Dad – it would have been like crying about a crater that had suddenly opened up in the house, or a black hole. You can’t cry about something you can’t understand, that you can’t feel: and you can’t feel or understand a void. His sudden and complete and overwhelming absence was too big and shocking for tears.

But I cried about the fact that my sister was so very helpful, and I was nothing at all.

When Mum came upstairs and comforted me and asked me if I was crying about Dad, I told her the truth. She was surprised, but she wasn’t angry. She told me that it wasn’t a good idea to listen into other people’s conversations, that what you picked up was only ever part of the story. And then she held me tight, and told me that I did help her, all the time, and especially now that Dad had gone.

‘You’re my reason for getting up in the morning,’ she told me. ‘I know Amanda will get herself up and out of the house and off to school on time, but if I didn’t tell you to get out of bed you never would, would you? You see, it’s good for people to be needed. It keeps us going.’

And then, the morning before the funeral, she arranged for a hairdresser to come to the house and plait my hair with ribbons, and pin it up in a circle around my head.

I felt like I was wearing a crown. Somehow, it made it possible – necessary – to get through it. To be dignified. To manage. And pretty much every single adult who spoke to me at the funeral (often through tears, and sometimes it was hard to make out what they were saying) told me how much they liked my hair.

That was when I discovered what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Before then, I’d loved doing hair, but I’d assumed that when it came down to it, it was unlikely that I’d get a job that was so much fun, any more than people in real life were ballerinas or fairies or any of the other interesting things that they were in books. But afterwards, I was determined. I didn’t want to do anything else.