‘Charlie!’ she says. ‘Happy birthday!’

‘Hi, Mum.’

Mum takes my hand and squeezes it. ‘It’s great to see you, Charlie.’

Her hand feels too hot. I squeeze it back, then I shove my hand into my pocket.

‘Great to see you too.’

I don’t want to meet Mum’s eyes, in case I see a sadness there that I don’t want to be true.

I look around the room: a metal bed with Mum in it; a red chair with Dad on it; a folded-away TV screen; a small white cupboard; dangly medical stuff attached to the wall.

‘Where’s the baby?’ I ask quietly. My neck prickles with a horrible cold, worried feeling.

‘Dara’s …’ Mum starts to answer, but then the door opens and a nurse bustles in backwards pulling a squeaky trolley, with a transparent baby bed on top, a bit like a fish tank.

‘Here’s little one!’ says the nurse brightly.

I stand back to let the nurse park the trolley next to Mum’s bed.

‘Beautiful little brother you’ve got there, love,’ she says to me with a smile.

She writes something on a clipboard and goes out again.

‘Come here, Charlie,’ says Dad. But he’s not looking at me, he’s gazing into the baby bed and his eyes have gone all melty. Mum’s staring dreamily at the baby too.

A little pang of jealousy wriggles in my tummy. Trying to smile, I squish the pang away, step closer to the baby bed and peer in.

Dara.

My brother.

Maybe it sounds daft, but I’d thought I’d kind of recognise him, just see immediately that he’s my brother, but … he looks not like I expected at all. I think of all those wriggly, giggly babies you see in nappy adverts and I swallow. Dara doesn’t look like that.

I stare down at him:

He’s so small, so impossibly small, and his face is kind of squashed-looking and weirdly wrinkly, like his skin is too big for him. He’s really still as well; just lying there, asleep, his hands up next to his head, tiny fists curled tight. Only his chest moves, rising and falling very quickly as he breathes. It makes me nervous, his too-fast breath.

Mum and Dad are watching me. ‘He’s beautiful,’ I say. I smile at them, but I look away again fast, before they spot that my smile is pretend. I feel so bad about it but I don’t think that my new brother actually is beautiful at all.

The honest truth is that Dara frightens me; everything I notice about him is kind of … not right. His skin is grey, not pink like it should be; his lips are in a tiny O shape like he’s whistling but I think they’re slightly blue. What scares me the most though is that he has a very thin tube, like a straw from an apple-juice carton, going right round his head and into his nose.

Dara.

I blink down at the disappointment of him, still smiling my pretend smile, and also trying not to cry. He suddenly scrunches up his face; the surprise of his movement makes me jump and Dad laughs at me.