“They had to fight so much for me when I was small … with doctors … therapy … It’s like fighting for me was the only thing they had in common. The only thing that held them together. By the time I got a little older and didn’t need them so much, they realized they had nothing to say … and since they’d actually never really talked to me … everything just kind of went quiet…”

Marty listened.

“It’s just … I miss them…”

The silence around them deepened somehow.

“I really miss both of them.”

“I miss my dad too sometimes,” Marty confided, “even though I never really knew him…”

“And I miss my dad when I live with him.”

They smiled at each other sadly.

“Sometimes, I think it’s more the idea of him?” Marty shrugged. “It’s like he’s this itch I’ve got to scratch or…” Marty ran out of words. “I don’t know, but the one thing I do know is it’s your dad that’s missing out. On your dancing. And you’re going to ace this competition, and after that, you and me and Grandad are going to sail that pumpkin to Paris if it’s the last thing we do!”

Gracie smiled at him.

“I like this new you…,” she said.

“You know what?” He paused. “I think I do too.”

All the kids spilled out of the school gates loud and boisterous. There was a certain energy that came with six hundred kids being let off the hook for six weeks. You could taste it in the air. Marty always used to watch their faces as he unchained his bike at the end of term. There were the lucky ones, the ones whose mums had brought them a picnic as a nice start to the summer holidays and were waiting for them, ready to walk to the park, a ball tucked under their arms. Then there were the rich ones, whose parents were waiting in their 4x4s, ready to drive straight for the airport. They would be sitting on a beach in Portugal by the next morning. Then there were the kids who were picked up by grandparents, sentenced to six weeks of being taken here and there because their parents couldn’t get the time off work or some jerk of a boss wouldn’t let them change their shift patterns. And then there were the ones like Marty. Slow to leave the school. Knowing that the next six weeks were going to be, well, difficult. Maybe boring. That they might get hungry. That there would be no routine. Nothing really to look forward to. This was the first year he hadn’t felt that way, and his heart ached for the ones who did.