As soon as Jo comes in through the door, back from the lycée, her father is waiting, sitting at the kitchen table. They haven’t mentioned it since the night of the fair; their eyes meet.

“Sit down.”

She obeys without a word; she notices her mother’s not there, nor is Céline.

“Did you know?”

“No.”

“Don’t treat me like a fucking idiot. I’ll ask you again: who is it?”

He’s covered in bits of concrete. His hands are almost white with it. Jo stares at the relief of tiny, solidified droplets. She latches onto the dotted patterns, gets lost in the flesh of his fingers. He clasps his glass. He’s drunk already – a bit, not too much.

“I don’t know, I swear.”

“Don’t swear. You must know.”

Jo says no. She repeats it, shaking her head, lips sealed – and bores her odd eyes into his short-sighted gaze. He hates that. He loves his youngest but has always found her strange, and he’s not the only one. Very soon, very early on, what with the silence and the odd eyes. One green, one blue, with similar undertones but no actual likeness. It was scary even when she was a kid. In any case it was too weird for people not to mind. Old people saw ill omens in her mismatched eyes, and her peers a strangeness which pigeonholed her in a different reality from theirs. Oddity has its advantages. Because they keep pretending not to see her in order to avoid looking into her eyes, people end up forgetting she’s there. This encourages a certain quirkiness, and she sometimes takes advantage just so she can keep up her slightly mad act, this hazy screen between herself and others. Right now, with her father, she needs it. The truth is she really doesn’t know who got her sister pregnant. She counts backwards three months, but can’t think. It’s hard to tell with her sister. The smooching behind the funfair rides was a long time ago. Céline is attractive, but let’s not kid ourselves: for some people she’s not much more than a tart.

“I don’t know, really.”

The father sighs. Jo is suddenly afraid he’ll crack and break down. In his dark, aggressive face, the pale eyes are rimmed with eyelashes that are too long, like those of a child. The semi-darkness in the kitchen hides from Jo what she doesn’t want to see. She’d rather have smacks – on the buttocks or across the face, it doesn’t matter. But she doesn’t want to see him bawling his eyes out. The clock is going tick-tick-tick, seconds turning with that stupid Mickey Mouse in the middle; she counts twelve before getting up. She opens the fridge, takes out two beers and puts one in front of her father. He looks up with gratitude and removes the top with his lighter. She lets him reach out for the second one. Then she goes out, with the second beer and a cigarette she took from his packet. She knows he’s raised his head again and is looking at her through the plastic strip curtains. She can feel his eyes between her shoulder blades and on her behind.