I read all the time, and grown-ups sometimes said that I talked like I’d swallowed a dictionary – I knew plenty of words, though I didn’t always know how to say them, which they always seemed to find funny. I was better at reading than talking, and unfortunately, my love of stories didn’t help me all that much in school. I wasn’t very good at following instructions or writing the kind of sentences my teachers wanted me to write. My reports always said I was easily distracted. I certainly wasn’t top of the class like Ava, and there didn’t seem to be much point in trying to be when she had got there long before me, and never showed any signs of slipping up.

She was going to be doing her GCSEs that summer and I was never allowed to forget it. I had tests coming up too, the standard tests everyone sat before leaving primary school, but they didn’t count for much as far as Ava was concerned. I got in masses of trouble if I woke her up when she was trying to have a lie-in, or did anything else that might run counter to her becoming a well-rested, fine-tuned exam-taking machine.

The doorbell rang, which was a pain because our buzzer wasn’t working and Mrs Elliott, the landlady, was being rubbish about getting it fixed. Ava came out of our bedroom into the hallway and yelled at me through the open kitchen door, ‘Can’t you go and get it?’

She couldn’t even be bothered to come and ask nicely. That was typical of Ava: her homework was so important that the extra seconds it would have taken to come right up to me and ask in a normal voice, or the extra minute it would have taken to go down to the front door herself, were out of the question.

‘Suppose so,’ I said.

Ava didn’t even say thank you; she just disappeared back into our room and slammed the door shut. I stuck my tongue out at her, grabbed my door key from the hook and set off downstairs, shutting the front door of the flat behind me. Mum was as paranoid about security as she was down on men, and it was fair to say that we’d had one or two dodgy neighbours in our time. I had been trained to do my bit to make sure it wasn’t easy for someone to walk in and rob us.

All I could see through the glass panes of the main entrance onto the street was the red of the roses. I opened up and the delivery man said, ‘Flowers for Mrs Harris, 25b?’

‘That’s my mum,’ I said.

Mum had kept her married name: she said she’d earned it, having survived her time with Dad. (He was usually ‘your father’, as if acknowledging his connection to us was the only way she could bear to talk about him.) Ava thought Mum should be Ms, but Mum said that sounded like a single woman who didn’t want people to know she was on her own. Ava said that wasn’t very feminist and she was always going to be a Ms and she was never going to change her name, and Mum said it was the world that wasn’t very feminist and Ava was too young to understand that but she would find out one day.