‘Oh yeah? Like what?’

Mum wrenched her bedroom door open. She still had the phone in her hand. She said, ‘What’s going on? Were you listening to my private phone conversation?’

‘I just wanted to ask you to test me on my spellings,’ I said. ‘I didn’t dare ask you,’ I said to Ava, ‘because you’re always so grumpy.’

‘Well, you could have waited until after I’d finished,’ Mum said. ‘Come on then, let’s give these spellings a go.’

Ava gave me a look as if to say, A likely story, and went back into our bedroom and closed the door.

I got the spellings all right but Mum was so distracted she hardly remembered to praise me. Thinking about Ava, no doubt, and whatever Mark had said about her.

I hated Ava sometimes. Hated her more than I could ever have brought myself to hate anyone else.

It was just so unfair. No matter how hard I tried, and no matter how little she tried, people always noticed her. And they always would, even when she was an old, old woman, and well past being pretty any more. Even if it was only because she was cantankerous and disagreeable, she’d always be the one who came first.

And at the same time I loved her. After all, she was the one who’d had a go at Mark for not listening to me. She always looked out for me, and I knew she always would.

That was part of the problem. I owed her too much, and there was no way I could make it up to her. She was a great big walking reminder of just how small I was, and of all the ways in which I could never catch up.

A few days later Mark showed up at the flat when Mum wasn’t there.

She was out at work and Ava and I were both home, in our usual places – she was in our bedroom, which was somehow more hers than mine, and I was in the kitchen, writing a story about a future world that was dark all the time and filled with wolves. The story was going to end with the most dramatic thing I could think of, which was for the narrator to die an unpleasant death. I had a big A4 notepad to write in, which Mum had got me, and a specially nice pen. I would have preferred to type my stories up on the laptop, but Ava hogged that most of the time and Mum never gave a proper answer if I asked when I could have a laptop of my own.

I’d done about a page of the story, which was about as long as it usually took before I got bored and started moving things on so I could bump the narrator off and finish. Then the doorbell rang and I looked out of the window and there was Mark’s Jag, parked a little way down the street because the space directly in front of our building was taken. And there was Mark, walking from the car to our building with a great big pile of red hardback books in his arms.