Or there were the times she could go for a week, sometimes weeks, without touching alcohol, or at least seeming relatively normal about it. She was fabulous when she was like that. Energetic, funny – a whirlwind of efficiency. She was a great sorter-outer: things got done in those moments between sessions. And in those times I would relax. I’d let her in. Like last year when I let Dad tell her about a maths award I had won, and the special ceremony and dinner school was having for all the students who had won awards, and their parents. I’d wanted just Dad to come, but he hadn’t been able to make it. Mum had been really great for three weeks, so he convinced me that it would be fine. I should have known. It was always the worst when she’d been good for a while – it was a waiting game. I should never have risked it on something so important. Clearly the idea of it freaked her out somehow. She preloaded – I didn’t know. And she was great at first – her sparkling self. She charmed the room and I felt more fabulous by association, like I could easily be nobody if she wasn’t around to draw attention to me. And she was my biggest fan. No-one thought better of me than she did. I was her sparkling success story. She was so proud of me.

But after an hour of sitting at the table with a seemingly never-empty glass of wine in front of her, soon there was dropped food, a broken plate, and some too-close drunken rambling at the father of the science award winner who was sitting next to her. I sat there watching him leaning back from her, obviously trying to extract himself from the conversation, and I felt sick. And then of course she couldn’t drive anymore, and we’d had to stand out on the road, me propping her up, trying to hail a taxi as all the other kids and their parents drove past us and away into the night.

It was almost as if she’d been afraid of sitting quietly next to me. To be my partner and support at an event in my honour. Like she had to turn the event into something else because if she didn’t she mightn’t be able to think of anything to say to me, or like through quiet conversation she might learn some things about me, some real things.

The next day Mum had been full of the fact that we were the absolute life of the party, and what a dull event it would have been without the fabulous Krause girls. And Dad smiled and laughed, and I smiled and laughed too.

In Cathy’s old room I dropped my face into my hands and squeezed my eyes shut against the tears that pushed there. I needed her now. I needed her so much. And I needed her to be different from how she was. I didn’t want to have to be the best, or the sparkliest, or the smartest, just to have her see me, or talk with me, or be part of my world. All the satisfaction I had felt earlier had melted away. And here I was again. Just me. Me. Alone and panicked and everything my own fault.