‘Steady, steady,’ Mr Stevens muttered. The cat tried to scratch at his right arm but he lifted it up so that its flailing paws couldn’t reach. His mouth had fallen open slightly, and Tim could see thin rows of white teeth in the darkness behind his lips. For a second before it was over, Tim thought he saw something else in his dad’s face. Some subtle change that he couldn’t quite place. It might have been his cheeks, which suddenly seemed to droop down more than they usually did to give his skin a slack, flabby look, or it could have been his eyes. For just a moment his eyes had seemed more yellow than brown. Tim was reminded of how his dad looked when he used to perch at the end of Tim’s bed and tell him stories. How the bedside lamp had made his eyes appear yellow then, too.

Then Mr Stevens was dropping the brown biscuit and fastening his right hand over the cat’s screeching head, and Tim’s attention was drawn to what his hands were doing as they twisted first right and then left, sharply, like he was trying to twist the lid off a particularly stubborn jar, and suddenly the cat’s body went limp and when Tim looked back at his father his face seemed normal again.

It must have been a trick of the light, Tim thought, and then he leaned forward and threw up his morning Cheerios onto the patio.

He stared down at the mess in front of him and felt the blood pounding in his neck, and he knew his dad would be angry with him, his dad hated mess and weakness, but when he worked up the courage to look at his father – who’d laid the cat’s body onto his lap with something close to tenderness – he was surprised to see that Mr Stevens was smiling.

It might just have been the fact that the sun had slipped behind a cloud again, but Tim thought he also looked less tired than he had before.

The cat, Tim thought. He just killed Mr Talbot’s cat.

He felt his stomach clenching and thought he was going to be sick again, but this time he managed to keep it down. His eyes drifted up to the fence at the bottom of the garden, the fence with the little wooden gate, and for a moment he imagined himself getting up and running. Running through that little gate and off down the road, away from his father.

I could just be one of those people that hates their parents, Tim thought. Plenty of people are like that. Sally Graham at school always says she hates her mum, and Charlie Higgingshasn’t seen his dad in years. It happens all the time, it—