The kitchen was falling apart, the cupboard doors loose and the fittings cracked, the wallpaper and the brown lino floor both peeling. Feline-safe houseplants covered most surfaces – devils ivy crawled above the cupboards, where the cats couldn’t reach. They were Jasmine’s additions, her latest attempt to purify the air of cigarettes and weed.

‘I can —’

‘Get,’ said Murphy again.

Jasmine was short and lithe like her late mother, her clear blue eyes smudged with shadow and dark liner. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail: once ginger like her mum’s, it was now dyed raven black.

Murphy, by comparison, was tall, bearded, and built like a lumberjack. Celtic tattoos covered a solid chest, big arms, thick legs. He was clad only in the crumpled Calvin Klein boxer-briefs he had slept in.

The cat mewled and leapt out of Jasmine’s arms. Named Myrtle after the Harry Potter character, the cat walked a few feet away, fell onto her side, and appeared to fall immediately asleep.

‘Look, Dad, I don’t think you understand what I’m offering here . . .’

‘I know exactly what you’re offering, sweetheart.’

‘But it’s hiking, Dad!’

‘And it won’t kill you.’

‘You don’t know that —’

‘She could stay and clean her room, lad,’ offered her uncle, Butch. He was in the kitchen with them, cooking breakfast, bopping along to the music, a joint in one hand and a pan frying bacon in the other. As always, he wore a navy singlet and dirty footy shorts.

‘Don’t,’ warned Murphy, focused on his task. He added more weed to the scale, until it was exactly an ounce.

The family resemblance between Butch and his younger brother Murphy was obvious, but Butch was much rounder in the cheeks and body. He also had daggers and a Mexican sugar skull tattooed on his neck. Butch had earnt his nickname in high school for his size, but both of them were an identical six-foot-three. No one called them by their first names unless they wanted a fight.

‘Uncle Butch, can I stay home?’ Jasmine skipped to his side, light as a feather. ‘Please? Can I?’

‘Sure thing, Jaz,’ said Butch, taking a drag from his joint. ‘Arty-pay at the Urphys-may.’

‘Your teacher called me specifically to check you’d be there,’ Murphy said. He put the ounce into a ziplock bag and sealed it with a vacuum tool, his movements careful and deliberate. ‘You’ve wagged too many days this year already. So you are going to school, and you are going on the camp, and you are going to like it.’

‘Yeah, Jaz, if Miss Ellis says so . . .’ said Butch.

‘That’s the only reason he’s making me go,’ said Jasmine in disgust. ‘He just wants to get in her pants.’