Busola could see we were all against her. She’d got rid of her mum but we hadn’t told her she could get rid of ours. No wonder she couldn’t eat. We felt like killing her. She was gonna have to change, or she was gonna have to starve. She was gonna have to go on drinking stale milk.

But then my dad spent money on tins of Fray Bentos pies and Ambrosia cream custard you couldn’t get wrong if you followed the instructions. Big tins of it got passed round with a spoon until it was gone. It was a reward and she didn’t deserve it. If my dad wasn’t there, Manus was allowed to open it and Busola got none. It was a feast and she wasn’t invited. But if he was, she forgot she had stomach ache and ate the custard out the tin. It was smooth and cold and creamy and delicious. It was almost as lovely as our mum, but she was warm.

‘What you gonna do about it?’ Manus said. The tin ran out and there was no more custard. We hadn’t given her none. We’d given her the spoon to lick.

‘I’m gonna make sure Daddy finds out you’re on her side,’ she said, licking the spoon handle. ‘And I hope he kills you.’

She was tough, Busola. No one was gonna try and beat her up any more. She had all the power, she wasn’t gonna give in. But she didn’t have the power to bring our mum back.

My dad started making her do the washing-up. We were running out of clothes and he was showing her how to wash them. She wasn’t allowed to go out after school and she could feel him breathing down her neck frying eggs in the pan, she wasn’t doing it right. She hadn’t thought about that. She was gonna have to take our mum’s place. She looked embarrassed when he told her to bring him his gari, which was like porridge in cold water with lemon juice. She squirted the whole of a plastic lemon in the bowl and he poured it down the sink with a disgusted look on his face. She’d bitten off more than she could chew, and we were satisfied. But he wasn’t, ‘Do it again.’