Maeve is in the sick bed with glandular fever, and so myself and Evelyn hit off to the New Year’s disco by ourselves. We spin around with our arms in the air, dappled by coloured lights, the music sustaining us and leading us about the floor. It feels as though everyone’s watching us admiringly. I end up kissing Dylan Hartigan at midnight, and at

‘I didn’t really want a race. I only wanted peace and quiet.’ His face is bright and flushed, his tousled thick hair soaked with sweat. ‘I’d prefer it being just the two of us.’ The air around us is changing colour. There are forces at play beneath the surface. There are invisible filaments reaching out from me and sparking with the invisible

It seems my passion for Aidan has been like a flare going off, full of colour and light, but falling from the sky and coming to nothing.

‘Evelyn wasn’t hungry,’ I reply absently, thinking hard about Aidan and how I’m only the fall-back girl. It seems I can have nothing for myself.

‘Did you dunk your head in the dirty bathwater?’ Evelyn says, laughing, and I clasp my sides with laughing too. I haven’t always the confidence to be kind to Maeve in Evelyn’s presence. ‘And did Tom and Mary have the bath before you as well? I’d say they did.’ ‘They did not. I had a fresh bath,’ says Maeve with a shaking voice. We sit there hooting

It’s important when you’ve good news to tell the right people. People who understand the dream or have a dream of their own. Otherwise you end up feeling deflated.

When we’re all together, the world revolves around Evelyn, and why wouldn’t it. Her long hair shimmers in the glare of high summer, sun-bleached at the temples. She has new things to wear: a peach sundress and sandals with leather butterflies sewn on the ankle straps. She’s full of herself in the lovely outfit, gaining great pleasure out of her own

‘All the adults tell us he’s real because they want us to be good,’ she says. ‘But the truth is there’s no one watching. God is only made-up. So you can do whatever you want.’ She’s so casual about it, not forceful at all, that I’m struck with a magnificent terror, the likes of which I’ve never experienced before. If there’s no God, then there’s no

It’s easy to know what life is like for Daddy. Daddy is happiest when he is fixing up a place and putting it in order. Daddy smells like turpentine and he has black and white hair like a sheepdog and when he’s at home he wears white sneakers stained green from mowing the lawn.