Today I am happy because I am in Daddy’s garden, and it’s just Daddy and me. And I’m wearing my red shorts. And I’m wearing my yellow T-shirt too. Aunt Verity has never bought me swimmies. She says the sun will burn me and make my skin crispy if I don’t wear shorts and a T-shirt.

‘The sun has got its hat on, Tiger,’ Daddy says, and I look up at the bright blue sky. The sun is big and shiny, and because it might make me blind, I squeeze my eyes so they are nearly closed. I can just about see through the slits.

I’m having the best fun ever in my paddling pool, splashing, splashing, splashing. I can’t actually swim in the pool because it’s too small, but quite a long time ago, Daddy took me down to the sea. And I swam and swam, and he clapped his hands and said I was amazing. I like it when Daddy calls me amazing. And I like days when it’s just Daddy and me, when Aunt Verity is busy at the big house doing her jobs, like washing or mowing the lawn – or she’s painting her pictures.

‘Can you hear the birds singing, Tiger?’ Daddy says, looking up again from writing in his notebook. He likes to write. He says it makes him feel better, and one day, when I’m bigger, he says he’ll read all of his stories to me. But for now they are a bit too scary. Instead he reads me fairy tales. My favourite is Rapunzel.

‘Shh, Tiger,’ he says, when I splash again. ‘Stop and listen to the birds.’

So I stop splashing, and look up at the trees. ‘Chirp, chirp, chirp.’

*

Later, when Aunt Verity comes to get me, she starts shouting at Daddy, her face turning red, and she throws a whole deckchair and its leg breaks off, and Daddy marches like a soldier up and down the garden, rubbing his head, and making growly noises like a big bad bear.

‘I don’t want Tiger to end up like us, V,’ he yells.

‘And you think you have a right to an opinion? I can count on my hand how many times you’ve seen Tiger in the last five years.’

I grab my cuddly tiger, that Daddy bought me for my birthday, and curl up into a ball and roll under the hedge, like an invisible hedgehog. Listening.

Daddy shouts that he wants me to go to school, to be normal. Be like other kids. But I know what school is like because I’ve seen Grange Hill on the television, and I don’t want to go there, not one little bit.