That night I heard Mum and Dad arguing, and I sat by the crack in the door to gather intelligence. Mum was telling Dad he could stay home from work and care for Caleb if the ‘rat’ caused an asthma attack, and Dad was saying don’t be ridiculous, and if Caleb didn’t touch the guinea pig he would be fine. Mum said it was okay for him to say that because he wasn’t stuck nursing a sick child all day, and Dad said she mollycoddled him and that a bit of dirt and rough and tumble would do Caleb the world of good. Mum said don’t tell me you agree with that dreadful sister-in-law of yours that it’s all in Caleb’s mind, and Dad said no he didn’t, but it was also important to try to toughen him up so he was strong enough to cope with it. The arguing went on like that for ages, and after a while I went back to bed.

Because there had been good things about the day, I tried to just think about happy stuff. It wasn’t easy because I’d start imagining what my knight’s armour would look like, and then suddenly I’d see Mr J’s nasty face in front of me. So then I imagined poking him a bit with a sword to keep him at a distance, but he just grabbed it and pulled it out of my hand. Then he threw it on the ground like a twig and laughed at me. I must have been trying very hard to just imagine good things, because when Ruthy walked in and looked at me, she asked why I had screwed my face up so tight.

The only thing I could think of to say was that I hoped my injury wouldn’t stop me from sword fights when I became the first girl knight of the round table. Ruthy just stood and looked at me with her little hands on her hips, and I knew I wasn’t fooling her. But then, fooling Ruthy for long was something I never did.

CHAPTER 7

We all agreed we had to mark the next day down as a cross day again as soon as Mum got out of bed. I didn’t think I’d done anything bad in my sleep but I must have, because Ruthy and Caleb agreed there wasn’t anything else happening that could have been what Ruthy called ‘causal’ except for me starting things rolling by falling off Mr Driver’s fence. We checked my pillow but there were no scabs we could see or bits of blood on it, so it wasn’t that.

We took some paper down to the tree house and decided to each make a list of why we thought Mum was unhappy again.

Caleb’s list said: sixpens is a rat and mum hats rats.

Ruthy’s list said: Dad had to come home from work and this will make Mr Bednarski upset. Also, Mum will have to have a guinea pig in the garden and she will be worried about mess and Caleb’s asthma.