I glare at Rach. I hate it when she talks about Jason. He may have opened the barracks door but he should never have gone to live there in the first place. What’s the point of having a real brother if we don’t stick together? Why should it be me who does all Ma’s jobs? He might not have needed to join up in the first place if he hadn’t taken his eye off the ball when that sponger started hanging around. I fidget on my hands, I know what he’d say. He’s the one fighting for us now. Good thing too else we’d have nothing. Like everyone else around here. 40

‘Does Tommo know how much you fancy Jase?’

She goes all coy. ‘I don’t, since I met Tommo,’ she says.

‘“Since I met Tommo”? You’re not bloody Cinderella, Rach,’ I say. ‘Sneaking a shag in the barracks is hardly sweeping you off your feet with a bunch of carnations is it?’

I smile as I wrap my arms round myself. We sound like actual grown-ups.

‘What of it? You’ve done alright in the end, haven’t you? We haven’t been sat in the middle of a roundabout smoking other people’s fag butts for ages now. Whose idea do you think that was, anyway? To build gardens in the middle of roundabouts as if people in this town are actually going to sit and enjoy the smell of petrol? They’d have been better off putting those dumb bottle banks in there. Somewhere to put all the empties. Like anyone in Warchester thinks about their rubbish—’

‘Carly?’ The door next to the cubicle opens to frame a woman peering over her glasses around the room.

‘Be right back,’ I shout over my shoulder to Rach as I follow the woman down the corridor and into a windowless side room. The door closes behind us without anyone having to push it. The woman makes a great show of shuffling papers, and opening and closing drawers in the tiny desk, before pushing her glasses back on her nose and looking at me.

‘How can I help you today, Carly?’ She looks like a woodpecker, I think.

‘Well, Rach said I could get the pill from you,’ I say, reading Wendy on her name badge. Wendy Woodpecker…

‘The contraceptive pill, you mean? Or emergency contraception?’

‘The pill, you know, the one I need to take every day.’

‘I see … And how old are you?’

I shift about in my seat.

‘I’m afraid you will need to answer a few questions,’ she says, blinking at me as she fiddles with the clipboard in her lap.41

‘Fourteen,’ I lie, wondering what will happen if she has to check my medical records. Then I remember this is an army clinic. Jason probably sorted this out too.

‘And you’ve started your periods?’

‘Well, yeah…’

‘When?’

‘When I was twelve…’