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until I could be sure that they had finally jogged on.
    ‘Arse,’ said Granddad, as I limped back into the living room. And again, glancing dismissively at the window: ‘Arse.’ Then he chuckled.
    I stared at him. And, completely unexpectedly, I found I had started to laugh, for the first time in as long as I could remember.
    ‘So did you decide what you’re going to do? When you’re better?’
    I was lying on my bed. Treena was calling from college, while she waited for Thomas to come out of his football club. I stared up at the ceiling, on which Thomas had stuck a whole galaxy of Day-glo stickers, which, apparently, nobody could remove without bringing half the ceiling with them. ‘Not really.’
    ‘You’ve got to do something. You can’t sit around here on your backside for all eternity.’
    ‘I won’t sit on my backside. Besides, my hip still hurts. The physio said I’m better off lying down.’
    ‘Mum and Dad are wondering what you’re going to do. There are no jobs in Stortfold.’
    ‘I do know that.’
    ‘But you’re drifting. You don’t seem to be interested in anything.’
    ‘Treen, I just fell off a building. I’m recuperating.’
    ‘And before that you were wafting around travelling. And then you were working in a bar until you knew what you wanted to do. You’ll have to sort your head out at some point. If you’re not going back to school, you have to figure out what it is you’re actually going to do with your life.
    ‘I’m just saying. Anyway, if you’re going to stay in Stortfold, you need to rent out that flat. Mum and Dad can’t support you for ever.’
    ‘This from the woman who has been supported by the Bank of Mum and Dad for the past eight years.’
    ‘I’m in full-time education. That’s different. So, anyway, I went through your bank statements while you were in hospital, and after I’d paid all your bills, I worked out you’ve got about fifteen hundred pounds left over, including statutory sick pay. By the way, what the hell were all those transatlantic phone calls? They cost you a fortune.’
    ‘None of your business.’
    ‘So, I made you a list of estate agents in the area who do rentals. And then I thought maybe we could take another look at college applications. Someone might have dropped out of that course you wanted.’
    ‘Treen. You’re making me tired.’
    ‘No point hanging around. You’ll feel better once you’ve got some focus.’
    For all it was annoying, there was something reassuring
about my sister nagging at me. Nobody else dared to. It was as if my parents still believed there was something very wrong at the heart of me, and that I must be treated with kid gloves. Mum laid my washing, neatly folded, on the end of my bed and cooked me three meals a day, and when I caught her watching me she would smile, an awkward half-smile, which covered everything we didn’t want to say to each other. Dad took me to my physio appointments, sat beside me on the sofa to watch television and didn’t even take the mickey out of me. Treena was the only one who treated me like she always had.
    ‘You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?’
    I turned onto my side, wincing.
    ‘I do. And don’t.’
    ‘Well, you know what Will would have said. You had a deal. You can’t back out of it.’
    ‘Okay. That’s it, Treen. We’re done with this conversation.’
    ‘Fine. Thom’s just coming out of the changing rooms. See you Friday!’ she said, as if we had just been talking about music, or where she was going on holiday, or soap.
    And I was left staring at the ceiling.
    You had a deal.
    Yeah. And look how that turned out.
    For all Treena moaned at me, in the weeks that had passed since I’d come home I had made some progress. I’d stopped using the cane, which had made me feel around eighty-nine years old, and which I had managed to leave behind in almost every place I’d visited since coming home. Most mornings I took Granddad for a walk around the park,