But then, the illness. She caught it off a classmate at school, who recovered in about a week, no time at all. But it felled Cathy. First, the heat of the fever, the intensity of the fever dreams. Then the fatigue, like her limbs were under water. She doesn’t remember much about the weeks and months that followed it, only little snatches. Reaching up to put her hair in a ponytail, the motion of her arms unexpectedly exhausting her. Falling asleep while cradling a cup of tea, and sleeping so deeply that when she woke up it remained in the exact same position, only cold.

She got sick on New Year’s Eve and it was April before she made lunch for herself. She would get up at ten, watch television until lunch-time. Nap. Watch television until the evening, when she was often in bed before nine. The doctor said her immune system had gone into its overdraft, that it needed to spend time repaying it, an explanation which made sense to Cathy, strangely logical in the chaos of the illness she found herself living in.

Cathy continued to recover over the summer and into the autumn. Everything she hadn’t been able to do during her illness was tentatively done, sometimes in small scale, in miniature, that autumn/winter. She baked a cake and lay down while it was in the oven. She took small trips out, but she rested in the back of the car on the way there.

And then suddenly, in the following January, she was mostly better. She had been talking to a boy on MSN on her laptop, sometimes, when she was ill, reclining in bed. He was in her school, in the year above her, had been off for almost as long as she had, with a broken femur that wouldn’t repair.

He’d come over that night, when she was in charge of Rosie. Rosie had been eight, Cathy thirteen, Joe fifteen. Everyone else had been out, at a family party that Cathy said she wasn’t interested in, but really just still did not have the energy for. She hadn’t wanted to hold everyone back, so said she’d look after Rosie instead.

Rosie was fast asleep. Cathy and the boy had headed into the den, closed the door, watched a movie.

Even now, with everything that happened after, and since, Cathy can remember odd details of that evening. The pavements glassed with frost outside. She’d lit three candles, three orange dots in the darkness on the mantelpiece. Never again would Cathy take for granted an evening spent with enough energy, not sleeping, not even the most mundane one, she was thinking, as she held hands with a boy called Sean she hardly knew but wanted to. Nothing bad would ever happen again, she really did think, on that exact evening. She’d had her dose of bad luck.

They’d emerged from the den after the film ended. She’d gone to check on Rosie, found her in her bed.