I waited outside by the back door a long time and no one came. The sun was warm and the backyard was full of flies from the bins round the back, lazy and buzzing off the walls and the concrete. They looked fat and blue or green, with brown blunt heads and black hairy bodies, wiping themselves down in front and kicking up their legs behind to clean under their wings. I couldn’t stop myself doing it even though I felt it was wrong, but I picked up one of the wooden scrubbing brushes by the buckets and started squashing them down hard where they were thickest by the drain. The bristles made a spongy thwack on the ground as I flicked the brush quickly before they could get away, and even though they lifted off and started to make a louder buzzing sound, they settled again, and there were always more that didn’t seem able to move. Soon there were little squashes of brown blood dotted all over the backyard and up the walls by the drainpipes. It was only that my wrist started to ache that I slowed down to do them one at a time and look at their squashed bodies with sometimes a wing waving out from the mush. I picked a wing off and held it up close to my nose. It was so small and see-through and brightly coloured that when it blew away I started only to do the bluebottles. They knew I was coming and kept hopping out of reach so I had to creep up on them. I got one on the bathroom step and the latch opened and Mr Babalola’s face looked down at me from inside the door. He didn’t say anything, but he’d caught me red-handed and looked at my brush and closed the door again. I put the brush behind my back and moved off to sit on the upturned metal bucket my mum put over the red rock by the backyard wall, only bringing the brush out if a bluebottle came in reach, but they knew it was there and flew off as soon as I started to move my elbow.

Marie came out and looked at me. She didn’t see what I was doing, so I dropped the brush behind me and pretended I was just sitting there, even though it made a clatter on the side of the bucket. She moved a broken stool with a wobbly leg over beside me and wedged it up against the wall and wiped the seat with her hand and sat down.

‘What do you want?’

I wanted to rescue her, but I didn’t know how, so I said, ‘Let me look at your books?’ It wasn’t meant to but it sounded like a question.

‘I did,’ she said. ‘I let you read over my shoulder.’

I shrugged, ‘I can’t read that fast.’