I asked Ruthy if I was as brave as Anastasia Armistad, but she said you weren’t really brave if you did risky things without even thinking about it, and I considered that for quite a while and decided it was probably true. She said I was more impetuous, impulsive and injudicious than brave, which made me guess she was studying words starting with the letter I.

I made up stories about kings and queens and knights. All the best knights were girls in my stories. Ruthy said this was quite unrealistic, but I pointed out they were my stories so that’s the way it would be. All the girl knights wore armour but had a special hinge so they could sit down for the toilet, because that was a problem that I had pondered for some time. When we’d made armour out of cardboard boxes Dad brought home from his work, it was quite an ordeal to unstick, unhook, un-staple and un-tape oneself when nature called. Caleb sometimes didn’t bother and wet himself, which made the cardboard go quite soggy, but he didn’t care.

My favourite story of my own was about a castle where there was only a queen and princesses and all the knights were girls. It was called Caramel, which is a bit like Camelot, but not quite. When other countries couldn’t kill their dragons or their enemies, they would send someone to Caramel and all the knights would have a meeting in a very lovely garden where rabbits and guinea pigs and dogs and cats ran all over the place, and they would decide whether to go to help or not. The price, if the knights of Caramel agreed to help, was that the country needing help had to give them one little girl baby as a reward, because the Caramel knights didn’t like all that sexing stuff Venita told me about at school, and it was better just to be given a baby than have to have it come out of your insides as you screamed blue murder for hours, which, according to Venita, was exactly how it happened.

In my story I was elected the head knight. Every girl knight had decorated armour, and mine had blue and green polka dots on top of the solid silver metal bits. I had a sweet little baby of my own called Arabella and a puppy called Plops, and a guinea pig called Thruppence, and the four of us lived in a small castle of our own and loved each other very much. Ruthy didn’t like the name Plops, but I had to remind her it was my story and therefore my choice.

In the third week after Caleb went to hospital, he went back to school. I hoped that would mean things would go back to normal, and Mum would get up and get dressed in the mornings, but she didn’t. When we got home from school each day, the house was cold and dark and quiet, and she was still in bed asleep. We crept in and put our bags away, and then agreed we should go to the tree house so we didn’t wake her up.