She doesn’t answer, just wanders off. He watches her feet in the grass, crushing daisies, her bare tanned legs, the tie-string that hangs between her shoulder blades bouncing. Does she want him to follow her, or what? How is he supposed to interpret the message? She’s The Prince and the rest of them are her Dominion. Probably best she doesn’t read the book. It might give her ideas.

He refuses to react to her crap and turns the page, and then dozes for a while, waking up to feel something tickling the backs of his knees. He lifts his shoulders off the ground and twists. Izzy is sitting next to him. His legs are strewn with daisies. He sneezes and half of them jump off.

‘You were fast asleep,’ Izzy says.

‘Where are the others?’

She shrugs. ‘Somewhere. Taisie’s being weird,’ she says after a pause.

‘Are you supposed to be speaking to me?’

She leans back on her hands and raises her face to the sun. Izzy is nothing like her big sister. Where Taisie is obvious, with her generous lips, ski-jump nose, large eyes and thick, shiny hair, Izzy is small and inward-looking. It’s hard to describe, but where Taisie’s presence fills a room, Izzy’s barely touches it. He’s known her since she was a baby, though, so he knows that there’s a mischievous side.

He jumps up and pulls her up with him. She executes a perfect cartwheel.

‘Piggyback, Shrimpy?’ he says.

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Why not, you are a shrimp.’

He lowers himself and she wraps her arms around his shoulders, her skinny legs around his waist and they take off up the garden, Izzy shrieking and Nick laughing. It’s the first time he’s laughed since he got here, if you don’t count the fake laughter. When they come round the house, Taisie is standing in the doorway with the twins and he feels the sudden tension in Izzy’s body, the cold front coming from her big sister. Izzy wriggles, and he allows her to slip from his back. She leaves him with a smile of regret that barely makes up for it and goes to them. They walk back into the shadowy darkness of the house, leaving him standing there feeling like a plonker. He closes his eyes and imagines himself under Westway, standing on the lip of the half-pipe waiting his turn, before dropping over the edge, knees bent, arms out, looking over his right shoulder, one hundred per cent focused, rocketing round the inside of the curve with the sweet clatter of wheel bearings filling his ears.

GRACE

Tuesday, 17 April 2018