‘Got on with things?’ she almost laughs, it’s a ridiculous way to describe those months which followed their return from Kenya, the months in which Yvonne ‘got on’ with nothing.

‘I can’t talk to Dad about this. I used to talk to my nana but…’ His face falls.

Yvonne lifts her hand to put it on his arm, but pulls back. She hasn’t seen him in a decade, she can’t suddenly step in and start comforting him. It’s not her place.

‘I don’t want to do this alone.’ His voice cracks slightly. ‘I can’t. I can’t do this alone.’

She knows what he’s about to ask.

Chapter Two

Snakebite

May 2001

Yvonne

The middle step is prone to squeaking, so Yvonne carefully avoids it as she heads downstairs. She tiptoes past the downstairs bedroom. Though she doubts a little noise will be enough to stop Emma and her latest fling doing whatever it is they’re doing.

Emma squeals from behind the sky-coloured bed sheet stapled in the doorframe. The door fell off weeks ago. The hinges, like everything else in their dump of a student house, rotted, and one night Emma drunkenly slammed it too hard and it swung from the frame with a crack.

It was Yvonne’s idea to put up the sheet.

There’s a growling noise from behind it now, followed by laughter, delight. It’s too intimate, Yvonne shouldn’t be listening to her housemate having sex, but it’s that car crash thing. How can she not?

The bed creaks and someone groans, guttural, she’s not sure if it’s Emma or him. Him being SWEETBOY76, his screen name on MSN Messenger. Over the last month, Yvonne has wasted so much time in the library, helping Emma to become her sexiest, smartest self, which has mostly consisted of correcting spellings of words like risqué and licentious.

The groans die down to light laughter followed by whispering, and in a way it’s more intimate. They really need to get the door fixed.

The kitchen looks worse than usual this morning, past messy and dirty, now firmly in the realms of filthy. Fairy lights twinkle around the whiteboard, Christmas every day, the board itself is covered with doodles of lecturers doing inexplicable things to each other and Box Room Bethany’s complaints about people using all her tampons.