The lights went green. She almost stalled the motor. No beep from the black saloon behind, which made it worse. She drove on, mindful of her speed. The radio was tuned to something pretty, but she couldn’t take much comfort in its noise. Her brother would be working at his draughting table now. The competition had been keeping everyone up late – there seemed to be no end of drawings to prepare and documents to write. Her only contribution had been typing. Mr Mayhood had instructed her to set up in the dining room with his Imperial and a stack of thick white paper. ‘You’ll need to practise first,’ he’d said, ‘to get your rhythm.’ He’d given her the folder with the Proctor house’s specification – all eighty-something pages, with their fiddly indentations and alignments. She’d known right away that it would take her weeks to get it looking right. He’d said, ‘Please copy it as best you can. Every page identical to how it’s been presented here. If you can master that typewriter, you’re going to save the rest of us a lot of time ahead of our submission date.’ Well, she’d tried – God knows she’d given it her all – but she wasn’t any better as a secretary than she was at drawing elevations. Later, Mr Mayhood had come back and taken one brief glance at her attempt. He’d scratched the stubble on his throat. ‘All right, Joyce,’ he’d said. ‘If typing’s not your forte, we’ll find something else for you to do.’ But she’d only been assigned to colourwashing prints since then and reading the McGoodwin book, which, in a mindless sort of way, she’d quite enjoyed. Any scraps of competition work had gone to Charlie, and he’d given them that steady focus he applied to everything. Recently, she’d come to feel more grateful for their differences. Her brother was a special lad – she’d always known it – but she understood another aspect of him now: he grew more in her absence. Their aunty had repeated it so often – You know he’s better off without you, Joyce – and, selfishly, she’d railed against the notion. Because she used to think it was her job to keep her brother grounded. To live in such a way that it reminded him of home – their real home, with their father, who would dangle him above the back lawn by the heels to make him squeal with laughter, and their mother, who would read him Edward Lear’s daft rhymes at bedtime and make funny faces in his mashed potatoes out of peas. Except – she’d realized it lately – these weren’t Charlie’s memories, they were just her hand-me-downs. And when he looked at her, he didn’t see their parents and their lives and what they’d been through. None of that. He saw a big dumb lump who’d landed him in borstal, a reminder of the things he’d lost, the family he’d barely known. If their mum and dad had loved them, he could only take her word for it. The painful part was to accept that Aunty Helen had been right from the beginning.