Busola got her breath back and went on, ‘I said he did –’ but she lost it again and struggled. She took a deep breath, ‘... but it wasn’t at the back of his trousers, it was at the front!’

I could have told her, Please, Busola, stop! but she wouldn’t have heard me, she was arching over on her back. And then she did it in an Irish accent, ‘It’s at the front, not the back!’

She got slapped. My mum reached out and bent down and slapped her hard on the side of the cheek, ‘Wipe that smirk off your face!’

It was only when I felt the slap I got the shock of what it meant – at the front ... Everything stopped.

Busola sat up. ‘You slapped me.’

‘Oh God, no, I’m sorry!’

‘You slapped me.’

For a week, longer, it was my mum begging and my sister getting revenge, ‘You slapped me.’

‘I won’t do it again.’

‘You slapped me.’

But then Busola got into one of my mum and dad’s rows, when he went out slamming the door. I wasn’t there and had to hear about it from Manus and Connor, but I could imagine it because I’d seen Busola get up my mum’s nose with a finger and twist. She told my dad what our mum said when she was crying on the floor after a row, and he’d gone out. We were pretending it wasn’t happening and she said we were siding with him, we were all niggers! and she was going to walk out on the lot of us. Because she’d lost it, and she wasn’t allowed to, we all said, Oh, Mum! and waited for it to blow over. But Busola told him. He threw up his arms and stormed out. Without warning, my mum jumped on top of her, scratching Busola’s face with her nails – they were short because she bit her fingernails like me – and said, ‘You’re-not-nice-to-know!’

There was trouble going on and my mum’s sisters were in the kitchen boiling the kettle for tea and smoking cigarettes.

‘Jesus, Bridie, he leads you a dog’s life,’ Tess said, and turned to Annie who was telling my mum to leave our dad and come with them. I wasn’t sure if they were saying for us to come too, or where they thought we’d go.

‘Excuse me,’ everyone turned to Busola, ‘that’s my father you’re talking about.’

‘Oooh ... Aren’t you the daughter?’ But you could see in their eyes they hadn’t seen us or thought we counted.

‘Go on, go out and play!’ my mum said, ‘It’s too steamy in here for you!’

It was raining, no one was going anywhere outside that teary, steamy, sob-filled, smoky kitchen with the teapot and the kettle on the boil.