‘He’s fragile.’ She says this a lot too, especially when her voice goes all slurry. Aunt Verity says fragile means breakable, and I don’t want to break my daddy, so I stay away – even though I want to be with him all of the time.

‘Maybe, you can see your daddy later today,’ she says as I carry on munching. ‘If you are very, very good.’

‘I will be good.’ I nod one, two, three, four, six, seven times, knowing I will be very, very good for the rest of the day.

‘But first we need to go across to the mainland, to stock up,’ she says.

I don’t like the mainland anymore. I used to like going to the village shop, as everyone was friendly there, and people would ruffle my hair and say, ‘How are you today, Tiger?’ But we’re not allowed to go there anymore. Not since the boy with the strawberry-blond hair kicked me. He was much bigger than me, but I wasn’t scared, I spun round and kicked him back very hard, and he toppled over onto his big fat bum.

‘If you come in here again, you little rat,’ the shop lady yelled, hugging the big boy with the strawberry-blond hair as he cried, ‘it will be the last thing you do.’

‘I’m Tiger, not Rat,’ I said, but she grabbed a broom and shooed us out onto the pavement, and everybody looked at us, and the nice people who said, ‘How are you today, Tiger?’ shook their heads and pulled angry faces.

‘I’ll set my Terry on you if you ever come back,’ the shop lady said before slamming the door.

So that was that.

I wasn’t sure what a Terry was, but I think it might be a big dog.

I cried, and I needed a wee wee badly, but when Aunt Verity cried too, I had to stop crying and cheer her up. I had to be strong and brave, just like a tiger.

So now we go to a big supermarket called Tesco. It’s scary there as there are lots of people who never look down, or smile at me and say: ‘How are you today, Tiger?’

Sometimes, as Aunt Verity pushes the trolley up and down and up and down, I pretend I’m invisible. But nobody notices. Not even Aunt Verity.

‘Go and get your trainers on,’ she says now.

I slide down from the chair like a slippery snake. ‘OK,’ I say, but I really don’t want to go to the supermarket. I want to stay here with the puppets.

I don’t like Tesco very much.

Chapter 31

Halloween Weekend 2019

Alice

Faith presses her nose against the window, eyes skittering across the darkness. ‘It’s still raining, but looks calmer out there.’ She glances over her shoulder at Leon. ‘Should we go out there and look for Gabriela?’