I didn’t want her to go, I wanted to hold on. ‘It was hard you were gone,’ I said. There wasn’t anywhere to go without her.

‘Did you ask after me?’

I looked up to let her know that wasn’t fair, I only knew what Daddy told me. ‘I even miss you when I’ve got you,’ I said.

She smiled, so I let myself fall back to sleep in her arms. ‘Go on, go up. You won’t need a top, it’s warm enough.’ I woke up again and told her what it felt like, ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Your dreams are for you,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

‘Does Daddy miss you?’

She put her finger against my lips, and I closed my eyes. ‘Go to sleep.’ A cloud was coming down, I couldn’t fight it. I felt her hand come down to hold my feet, and I reached up to hold a strand of her hair. ‘He’s not romantic.’

Whitsun

‘Let’s start again,’ my dad said.

The telly was off and the homework tables were out with their flaps up. I could feel chewing-gum stuck to the underside of the wood, round and smooth and hard, not even sticky, so it must have been there from the last time. Or maybe the time before, because it came off in my hand, and I was trying to get it back but it wouldn’t stick. I would have tried licking it but he might see me, and I didn’t know whose it was.

‘Twelve nines?’

Manus and Connor had their heads down on the other table doing long division, and I was being tested with Busola on our times tables. It was her turn with number nine and she was getting it wrong.

‘Nine times twelve?’

Times ten was going to be easy, she was times eleven, and I was going to be twelve. I didn’t have twelve in my head and I knew it was coming. I could feel the knuckles coming to knock on my head already, but that just made it harder. It tumbled over in my mind around sixty, then twelve nines was a hundred and ... He didn’t even ask the sums in order. It was at random.

‘A hundred ...’ Busola said, ‘No, ninety ...’ She was counting on her fingers, that was a bad sign. ‘...eight?’

‘Let’s start from the beginning.’ It was all right, he wasn’t angry, he just pushed up his glasses and went back. ‘Two nines are ...?’

‘Eighteen,’ she started, and went on, ‘three nines are twenty-seven. Four nines are thirty-six ...’