Another time she developed an enthusiasm for reading all the books in the library about Eskimo. She spent hours and hours poring over big stacks of school library books looking for any reference to them. When her enthusiasm wore off, she would look up surprised, as though she hadn’t noticed the world had kept spinning and that she had been away for a long time.

Since the day in the car after the union exams, Ruthy had developed a new enthusiasm about expanding her vocabulary. She chose three words every day and wrote them out, along with their definition, over and over again to help her remember them. She set herself the task of using them in a sentence that day too. As a result, at teatime we heard: ‘I think you should learn some new words Dorcas because of the impecunious nature of your vocab’; ‘Dad, can you think of an antonym for headstrong?’; and my favourite, ‘Mr Driver bears the loss of Mrs Driver with longanimity.’ I didn’t tease her about this, partly because at the moment any teasing between us seemed to end in an argument between Mum and Dad, and also because I was quite proud of her.

Instead of keeping her journal in the tin in our tree house with the rest of her collection of filled-up books, she kept the current one under her pillow and sometimes woke up in the night and wrote things in it using a torch. She wrote two letters to our brother Daniel, but wouldn’t show me what she wrote. I hoped it wasn’t bad things about me, because when I was very sad, I imagined Daniel coming home and telling me he wanted to spend all his free time with me because he loved me the best. And then he would go to school and beat up Rufus, and then punch Mr Johnson on the nose and speak sternly to Mum to remind her she was a Sister in Christ and should be happier more often.

Mr Driver gave each of us a torch on our birthday that year, but Mum had taken mine away because in art class I had decided to see what it would look like if I painted blue polka dots on my white school shirt and the stains didn’t come out. During the days since the exams, because I was so sad, and picking the sores in my head more than usual, if we both woke up in the night sometimes Ruthy would come into my bed with the torch and we would put it on under the covers so Mum and Dad wouldn’t see the light, and we would put our arms around each other and tell each other stories until one of us fell asleep.

Ruthy told very good stories. They were about children who did amazing things and won awards and travelled to exciting places and were on tellie a lot. She described what they wore and gave details about their friends and families. My favourite stories were the ones about a girl called Anastasia Armistad, who was very brave and invented cures for cancers and strokes and problems with your bowels. We agreed the cures for bowel problems were her greatest inventions because who would not want to be able to go to the toilet without someone helping you? Maynard told me that his grandpa had to wear a big nappy in his nursing home and sometimes it fell off a bit and stuff would ooze out and as a result Maynard didn’t really like to hug him and tried to sit a fair way away from him. His mother wouldn’t let him hold his nose, which is what he wanted to do, because she said it was disrespectful, but Maynard said his grandpa was disrespectful stinking everyone out to high heaven.