I didn’t know what had happened. There was an argument while we were gone about money going missing and the brothers had gone off with the tin and taken the Guy. Everyone blamed Manus and he’d gone round while their dad was out and got the money back off them. He’d spent some of it in the shop buying chocolate and handing out bars like he was rich to people who said they’d been collecting. I didn’t get any, but by the time I got back everyone had gone in anyway, so he put what was left under his jumper and took it home. My mum was in from the hospital and found the biscuit tin under the bed when she didn’t believe him about why he had chocolate on everything, and she took it to my dad. She said he came home with the chocolate melting on his face and his tummy rumbling.

He wasn’t good at lying, so they were just getting to the bottom of it, that he’d gone out begging with us, when the door knocked and his friends turned up with their dad saying Manus had stolen the money from them.

That was when me and Connor got home.

‘Are you so stupid, I won’t find out?’ I could tell he was angry from how calmly he was talking to us lined up in the front room. He looked from Manus to Connor, ‘Begging in the street?’ He looked at me, ‘I don’t feed you?’ And then at Busola. ‘And you,’ he said, turning to Manus again, ‘I have to find you stealing.’

Manus lowered his eyes, ‘I wasn’t stealing.’

My dad exploded, ‘So you bring your criminal friends to attack me? Bring them to my house?’ He looked at my mum. ‘Did they say he was stealing from them?’

She was standing by to stop it getting out of hand, but she nodded, her face stretched tight and looking sad. He was fuming.

‘It was Penny for the Guy –’ Connor said, but then he stopped and put his head back down.

‘Penny for what?’ my dad said, and waited for an answer. ‘Begging and stealing? You are all banned from going outside! Go to school, come home, I’m going to watch you like a hawk. You can forget anything else. And tomorrow, so you can think what you have done,’ he was looking at Manus, ‘I am going to break a stick on your head!’

Manus started crying. No one moved to stop him. It was what he got from our dad, and no one else did.

‘Now go away!’ he said, and we trooped out the room.

‘Why did you hit that man?’ I asked Connor when we were on our own.

‘Because he said we were begging.’

‘Oh,’ I said, thinking that was what our dad was angry about. Was it begging?