Irene sat by Aggie’s bed until she fell asleep. She saw how her daughter’s upper lip was swollen and there was a raw red patch on her cheek that her hair stuck to. Then she went downstairs, sent Carol home, and made poached eggs on toast for the girls. They sat at the kitchen table together. Clem pierced the skin on the yolk so it welled up and puddled onto the plate; her mouth was smeared a crusty yellow. Sasha cut the toast into squares and posted the pieces neatly into her mouth.

After supper, she sat in Sasha’s bedroom, reading Moominland in Midwinter to them for the third time. Clem crouched on the rug beside her in her boy’s pyjamas; if you didn’t know, you’d think she was a boy, thought Irene – her short hair, her uncompromising boy’s clothes, the football posters above her bed, the scabs on her knees from where she’d fallen over in the playground, her refusal to ever cry. She had her knees drawn up under her chin, and was picking at her toenails and scowling. Sasha sat at the table by the window, drawing an intricate geometric pattern onto a sheet of paper and colouring each square in a different colour. Irene looked across at her as she read: her hair was in tidy plaits, her nightie was buttoned up to the top, her back was straight; the tip of her tongue was on her upper lip as she concentrated on her precise mesh of shapes.

‘We’ll buy a tree this weekend,’ she said. ‘We can decorate it together on Saturday.’

‘All of us,’ said Sasha.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Daddy too.’

‘Tell him.’

‘You tell him.’

‘OK, I will.’

Irene tidied the already-tidy kitchen and then put a slice of cheese onto a cracker. She poured herself half a glass of red wine and swirled it around. She ate the dry biscuit between sips of wine, and peeled herself an orange, separating it out into segments and removing all the pith. She ate it slowly, then went into the living room and watched the evening news on television: the famine, the threat of snow, a twelve-year-old girl pregnant by her thirteen-year-old boyfriend, a Big Issue seller who’d won the lottery, a new kind of purple carrot.

Then, suddenly in need of company, she picked up the phone and called her half-brother. Jem was five years younger than Irene and before he was born Irene had hated him with a bitter, boiling jealousy: his mother had taken away her adored father; he was the cuckoo in the nest. In her furious calculations, he was the cause of everything bad; without him, her life would have continued like a picture book painted in primary colours: there’s daddy, there’s mummy, there’s darling little Irene in pigtails standing between them, holding each of them by the hand. Plumb in the centre of her own life.