The park at the end of her road offered sanctuary whenever it wasn’t freezing cold. There were swings that were comfortable enough to sit on and read for an hour, and a wooden playhouse designed for the smaller kids but that offered shelter from the rain as necessary. At the park she couldn’t be yelled at or belittled, didn’t have to listen to Carmen on the phone telling all of her friends what a drag it was being a step-mother.

Meggy, it had turned out, was an unnecessary pain in her step-mother’s arse. Given that her father worked excessively long hours, Carmen dropped her at school and picked her up, supervised homework, and was supposed to cook nutritious meals and keep the house tidy. This was the quid pro quo for the fact that an underqualified thirty-year-old with no kids had no job, and no interest in getting one. The reality was that Meggy prepared her own food when she got home, did a hefty chunk of the housework, and had made the mistake of arriving home early from school one half-day when Carmen had forgotten to pick her up, to find her panting heavily, naked on the sofa while on her mobile to a person she referred to only as ‘big man’.

Meggy had just gambled with that particular nugget of information, and lost. Her father (she’d recently learned a new phrase and was repeating it to herself at every given moment) was well and truly pussy-whipped. Her step-mother could do no wrong in Meggy’s father’s eyes. Blonde (from a bottle) and skinny (from using so many calories by being a total bitch), Carmen had only to lean over the kitchen sink sticking her butt out more than was strictly necessary, and her father would do literally anything she wanted.

As Meggy had imparted the story of Carmen’s naked writhings and accompanying sex talk to her father, Carmen had appeared in tears from the master bedroom, phone records wiped, holding the shreds of one of her favourite dresses, and claimed that her step-daughter was acting up out of childish jealousy. Her freshly pussy-whipped dad had done what all men finally getting to fuck someone new and vastly younger than themselves might have done, and believed the step-mother. He bought Carmen a new dress to make up for the one ‘Meggy’ had destroyed, and grounded his daughter – like that made a difference in her life – punishing her by allocating all the household chores to her for the following month. Also big whoop, but her father had proved he needed a much more dramatic wake-up call. So Meggy was going to run away.