I glance up at Tom because I’m not sure whether this is funny, and he is bound to know. Tom tightens his grip on my hand, which isn’t much to go on, but I decide not to laugh. Dad wants to usher us all along because we’re blocking the pavement, but Stella won’t budge. Her eyes are brimming and glinting.

“Come on,” says Dad, who has finished being amused.

The black snake knots itself around my chest as Stella starts to cry. People push past us and give us looks, and if it weren’t for Tom holding my hand I think I would cry as well. Stella says she needs extra pocket money and Dad says no. Stella says that’s not fair because she thought they were sweets, and Dad says no very quickly and quietly. Is Stella deaf to the warning in his tone, or doesn’t she care? Now she’s claiming that she bought the jar of red things for Dad’s Christmas present, and anyway . . . anyway . . . she’s as shrill as she can go, and she’s yanking on his sleeve like she wants to rip it off, and it’s only a matter of time before she kicks him on the shins . . . anyway, Mum was generous. If Mum were here she’d have given Stella loads more than ten shitty little pounds. A gasp from one of the stallholders. Someone tuts and says, “She only looks about ten—”

“I wish you were dead instead of Mum. Mum loved us way, way, way more than you do.”

Dad is gripping Stella by the arms and readying himself for the shin-kick, but he doesn’t look angry. I sort of wish he did. Instead, he looks tired—so tired—as if he might lie down next to the mulled-wine stall and never get up again.

Tom and I watch from the sidelines. It’s all we can do. Stella’s hat is flying off, and she’s smashed the jar of peppers, and her hair is everywhere, and she’s actually ripped a hole in Dad’s sleeve. She’s awful, and frightening, and beautiful. She fragments like a firework.

4

The church where my cousin had married was in the seaside town of Bligh, so at least I knew which bus to catch from the railway station, even if I didn’t have a clue what to do once it got there. I thought Byrne Hall would be unavoidable, dominating the landscape like a fairy-tale castle, but it wasn’t.

The bus was full-to-bursting with end-of-season holidaymakers, so I stood with my suitcase jammed between my feet and clung to the rail. A baby watched me fixedly over her mother’s shoulder and I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. The heat was denser and darker than it had been this morning when I left London, and the passengers swayed listlessly as the bus rounded corners and jounced over speed bumps. Every time the driver braked, my shoulder bag banged against my hip and my forehead knocked on the rail. It took a lot of calf strain and concentration not to fall over or plump down on someone’s knee.