My mum and dad had gone to bed for a lie-down and only two other people had knocked, the milkman with curly hair catching the rain and the man from the pools in a brown raincoat under a black umbrella. ‘She says she’s not in,’ I told the milkman, ‘she’ll see you next week.’ And I gave the pools man the coupon with the money clinking inside. They both gave me nice smiles and went away. But Manus and Connor were horrible to me.

I looked at the rain coming down and no one there as I held the door open, the splashes making bubbles that floated along in the gutter. The brown envelope of a pools coupon was being washed away. I stepped out to get a closer look. It was a brown baby pigeon being lifted up and put down with its wing spread in the water, and its eye open. We hadn’t buried the cat.

I followed Manus and Connor out to the bathroom and watched them having their bath. They didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask. There were bubbles on the dirty water as they splashed.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ I said.

They both looked up at me with the shampoo in their hair. Connor raised his eyes at Manus, and Manus shrugged. There was steam coming off and Manus blew it away with the bubbles from his mouth.

‘It was Oxo cubes,’ Connor said. ‘They showed us. It was a Sunday dinner for the soldiers. It crumbled in your hand, they said it was probably poisonous by now.’

‘What was it doing there?’

Manus looked at me like I was asking too much, ‘They said not to dig in the bomb sites.’

‘And if we found anything report it,’ Connor said.

I didn’t want to look at Manus, so I handed the flannel to Connor to get the soap out his eyes, ‘Where is it?’

‘We left it there,’ Manus said, telling me to shut up.

They were doing everything together and not including me, I still had mud on my feet. I waited until they were getting dry in their towels, ‘Was that cat really dead? Was it breathing? Did you go back there?’

‘It was raining, it was too dangerous,’ Connor said, and gave me a look like he was gonna kill me.

Manus’s face went the wrong way round feeling useless and ugly, like a hole inside him was filling up and he couldn’t stop the cat drowning in the mud. I didn’t want to hurt him, it was too late to take it back, I didn’t know how to stop it. It was like he was losing hope, and Connor was putting his arm round him.

‘Mummy’s gonna win the pools,’ I said.

Blood Brothers

‘You know we’re best friends?’

‘Yeah ...’ I said, but really I was holding on.