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had dabbled in drugs as a young teenager, then the family was unaware of it. Carl maintained it had never been part of their social scene at school but that all changed when she started work. At eighteen, she’d begun work for an advertising firm as their Girl Friday and it was at one of their industry parties that she first encountered and fell in love with methamphetamine. At least that was what her parents had managed to piece together from her friends. It was ironic that Annie, too, had wound up working in an advertising company but nobody could accuse Manning Stockyard, the firm she worked for, of being anything other than staid. They didn’t even do Friday night drinks—mind you, the thought of winding her week down over a casual glass of wine in the company of her boss Adelia Hunnington, or Attila the Hun as she not so fondly liked to call her, was an unappealing one.
    With a nine-year-age gap between them, Roz’s life outside of home was a side to her sister that Annie hadn’t been privy to until the day of her eleventh birthday party. After everybody had left and Roz was long gone with her latest boyfriend in a squeal of burning rubber, her parents had no choice but to sit her down and explain as plainly as possible what was wrong with her sister. They’d calmly told her they were trying to help her but she had to want to help herself too. The shouted conversations that had ensued every time Roz had visited over the last year, conversations that were cut short were Annie to walk into the room, suddenly made sense. It was only later, though, after it happened, that she really understood the implications of her sister’s addiction. Her affair with the substance was all-encompassing but then Roz had never been the type of girl to do anything by halves.
    Annie rubbed her eyes. She knew she was smudging her mascara but she didn’t care because her mind refused to curb the memories of what they had gone through as a family.
    The pressure of what was happening to their eldest daughter had nearly torn her parents’ marriage apart as Roz played them off one against the other. Her addiction had driven not only her friends away and lost her her job, but it had the flow-on effect of tainting their own social lives. They became known as the parents of “that girl, you know—the one on drugs.” For her part, Annie stopped having her friends home, preferring to visit their houses for fear of one of her sister’s impromptu quest for cash, out-of-control visits. There was no doubt more, much more that Roz had been driven to do when she had found herself out of a job and still hungering for the meth but she had slowly cut herself off from everybody who knew and loved her. This had spared Annie and her parents from knowing that side of her life further. Instead, they chose to cling to the daughter and sister beneath the horror of her dependency. She was the person they wanted to hold onto, the girl they had once known who had had a life to lead and a dream to chase after. That was the girl they hoped would come back to them.
    Their dreams, along with Roz’s, had ended the day she’d stayed up all night partying and had driven her car into a tree on her way home to the latest flat she had been dossing down in.
    For Annie and her parents, though, that wasn’t the end. Oh no, she shivered and wished she’d been bothered to light the fire as she thought back, it was just the beginning. Her mum started smoking again and seemed to be in a perpetual fog of non interest after that knock at the door had come cutting herself off from Annie emotionally. As for her father, a big man with an argumentative nature, well, he seemed to simply give up, if the slump in his shoulders and disinterest in what was happening around him was anything to go by. Annie didn’t just lose a sister that day but for a long, long time afterwards she lost her parents, too. They were a physical presence but they weren’t engaged in the day-to-day