I was stamping puddles on my own in the backyard as she leaned out the window. She was changing the rooms round now Marie had moved out with her mum and her dad had gone back to Guyana. Marie’s room down by the front door was my mum and dad’s, and that was where my mum told me to come when I bent down and shook my head. She was gonna ask me to carry the shopping with her and I didn’t want to.

She sat on the bed with the door closed and pulled me down beside her in a cuddle so I’d have to give in. The room was still crowded with the stuff she hadn’t packed away, and the curtains were pulled so it was half dark, but now her Kennedys were up on the wall beside the Nigerian army calendar and underneath was a picture of the sacred heart, its blood on fire. I hardened myself up to stop her getting round me.

‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

I shook my head. Even my dad was going easy on me and I could feel they were thinking I wasn’t well, but I just didn’t have anyone to play with. There wasn’t anything to say, only a feeling that I couldn’t carry any more and if I did I was going to burst.

‘When I was growing up,’ she said, ‘there was a girl, and whenever her mummy wanted her you could hear her name being called, Precious! Precious! And you should see the pretty dresses, because she had relatives in America sent them over in boxes. But one day she became sad. She used to love playing out, skipping along the road, and hadn’t a care in the world. One day she was happy and the next she was sad, and we didn’t know why. No one ever told us. But her mummy went on calling, Precious! What do you think of that?’

I shrugged.

‘Can you say?’

The thought of Marie saying it was my fault she was sad came back and I squashed it, but not completely. ‘What happened to her?’ I said.

‘She caught cold and died of pneumonia.’

‘Are you making this up?’

My mum shook her head. ‘In those days people didn’t know. They should have been cooling her down, but they wrapped her up and she overheated and died.’

‘I don’t want to die,’ I said.

‘Then you shouldn’t dwell on it,’ and she looked into my ears to see were they clean. She scraped her nail in to see if she could dig something out, ‘You may have to do without me one day.’

‘You just want me to carry the shopping on my own,’ I said. ‘You never ask them to do it, always me.’

‘Who’s them?’

‘Connor and everyone.’