Every morning I place a glass of milk by my brother’s door just like I used to do when he was home. Dad drinks it every single time and then he leaves the glass by my brother’s door for me to take away later on. Neither of us mentions it. I wear my brother’s pyjamas at night and I bake his favourite cake, over and over again, badly. I take the cake into our back garden and put it on the wall where he used to have his lunch. The foxes eat it at dawn. My green-eyed brother was happiest when he was dancing. He would try to lie to our parents but he could never pull it off – I always could. I write tiny notes to him. Leave them under the chest of drawers where he kept his cigarettes. I’ve taught myself how to smoke using his stash. I do target practice every morning on a range in our back garden which Dad set up for him. My parents don’t say a thing when they see me going out in my dressing gown with his pellet gun. I shoot whether it is sunny or raining. I have stood out there in sleet and snow. I shoot when my stomach is cramping from my period. I shoot when I am sick or I have a cold. I have become such a good shot it is scary. I am aiming for one person each time: the person who sent him to a camp. They claimed it was going to be a place for the men captured from his regiment to work out their remaining days in the war. This is not what they go there for. One person ordered that to happen. When I lift up my brother’s weaponry, I aim between the eyes of that person.

My brother was the best part of our family. I am one half of a circle now because there was never a me without him. We completed each other, yin and yang, him light with a touch of darkness, and me – I suppose there is at least a touch of light and the best of it, it came to me from him. He was the one that patiently kept explaining right and wrong to me, when he could see I did not naturally get it. There are photos of us as kids all over the house. We look out at the present day with no idea what is coming.