She frowned as she thought this, and she wondered at how on earth she had been lumbered with such a woman. These days, she went home for whole weekends, when she would prefer to be there only on Sundays and Mondays as it used to be. But her mother wasn’t stupid. She wanted her there because she wanted to make sure she didn’t go ‘out out’, as she called it. That meant with boys, although it was never actually stipulated. It was fine for her to go with her friends to the markets – it was what her mother had done, after all – but when the evening drew in she had to be indoors like an errant school kid.

Well, she would be fourteen soon – she wasn’t a baby any more. With her already ripened body she knew she could pass for eighteen with the right clothes and make-up. Christ Almighty, she could get in to see any film she wanted, and that was no mean feat. Some of her friends still looked younger than they were, but she was like her mother – all tits and legs, as her grandfather was forever saying. Gabby knew that she was pretty, knew that boys looked at her. Men did as well, though they made her uncomfortable. But they looked all the same – even some of her friends’ dads, and that was absolutely gross.

Her dad was great but, as always, he had to do what her mother wanted, so Gabby got no support from him. She felt sorry for him, because he seemed so sad a lot of the time, and yet her parents lived in a lovely house and, to an outsider, it would seem they had a nice life. But Gabby knew instinctively that her mother didn’t love her dad, not like he loved her, and that was why he was so sad inside. It was in his eyes, and it was tragic to see. Sometimes she looked at him and felt the urge to cry, he looked so forlorn, so lonely. But how could he be lonely when he had her and James Junior?

Her dad knew that they preferred it at their nana’s house – at least there they could be themselves. He knew that their mother was sometimes inordinately hard on them both, and he tried in his own way to make up for that. He ruined them, according to her mother, gave in too quickly, but she saw her father was sensible enough to appreciate that if you let a child be free, they would come back to you of their own accord. All her mother’s draconian measures seemed to do was make her want to break away, get away, as far away from the source of her unhappiness as possible.