That’s when I started to yell. I suppose it was stupid for us not to have done it earlier. Another walker might have been on the path by the stream. But now I think I did it more as a cry of fear and rage at what was happening. I began by screaming “HELP! HELP!” but soon the words changed into a raw sound, an animal screech. I poured not just the pain and fear of now into my yells, but all the bad things that had happened in my life. My mum leaving us, my dad falling apart, me having to look after Kenny. The days I went to school hungry – properly hungry – because I gave Kenny the one slice of bread we had left. The days I went to school dirty because there was no hot water, and no one would sit next to me. The days when other kids at school made fun of me because my trousers were halfway up my legs.

And I screamed because Sarah didn’t want to go out with me any more.

Sarah was my first ever girlfriend. I’d never kissed anyone before her. Never even touched another girl. Sarah was dark and pretty and clever, and she said five funny things for every one funny thing I could think of. She shouldn’t ever really have gone out with me in the first place. It was all mixed up with her brother, who was my mortal enemy. But even he turned out to be all right in the end. And me and Sarah had three months together, and they were the best three months of my life. Everything was OK. My dad was good – mainly because of Jenny, who put all the things back in our lives that we’d been missing. Even Kenny was finding his way in the world. He loved his special school and the mates he had there. So what if his best friend thought he was Dr Who?

And then there was my mum. It was only last year that we found out what had happened to her and where she’d gone. She flipped when me and Kenny were small. Kenny was a lot to handle. So was our dad. Maybe so was I. Mum got depressed, went a bit mad. Left. For years we thought she didn’t love us, didn’t even think about us. Now we knew that she had a new life in Canada, but she’d never forgotten us. She’d invited us to go there and stay for the holidays, but we didn’t have the money for that, so she was coming to us. I was still angry with Mum. Still filled up with feelings that no one could put a name to. But one of those feelings was love. So for the first time ever my life wasn’t shit.

And then …