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because Dinah is her favourite.
    â€˜Let’s swap pictures,’ she says. They take in the finished products to show their mother. ‘Which one do you like best?’ Lisa says.
    She always makes their mum choose. Their mother points to Dinah’s picture, which is currently in Lisa’s hands. Lisa is furious. She throws down the picture and stamps off.
    â€˜You’re the pet,’ she says. ‘She likes you best. That’s because I’m adopted. I know I’m adopted.’
    Sometimes Lisa, who is a good organiser, rallies the neighbourhood children into a gang. They stomp round and round the bungalow, banging on saucepans, while Dinah and her mum are having their lovey-dovey wheezy little rests together in bed.
    â€˜Dinah’s the pet of the fam-er-ly,’ they chant, over and over.
    Being the pet disadvantages you with the other children. Dinah is aware of this, but it’s a role she clings to, a role she can’t give up. And it’s true that they are both artistic, even though her mum is limited to expressing her talents in exclusively domestic contexts, so that Dinah remembers a birthday party when her mum made every child a ballerina table decoration with a filmy layered skirt made out of pastel tissue-paper. She remembers a farmyard birthday cake with a pen of marzipan pigs and a little coop of marzipan chickens.
    Dinah’s father is as fed up with all the sickbed bonding as Lisa is. He bangs about and swears in Dutch, especially at mealtimes when Dinah’s mum gives her the special Poor Little Dee treatment. He and Lisa are both first-borns. They are both strong, forceful and assertive personalities. They identify with each other. Dinah and her mum are shrinking violets. Dinah is still a non-eater, and her mum strains her freshly squeezed orange juice through a fine sieve because Dinah whinges if it has ‘bits’ in it. Her dad thumps the table and makes everything jump.
    â€˜You’re not straining that child’s orange juice AGAIN!’ he says. ‘She’ll come to a sticky end, you mark my words.’
    But Dinah carries on whingeing. ‘I’m not hungry for potatoes. I’m only hungry for gravy.’
    At breakfast she eats one-sixth of a dry Weetabix biscuit, but only if she’s allowed to glue each separated crumbly flake to a small slab of cold butter. Sometimes she’ll eat nine raisins after having arranged them in a pattern on the cloth. One day, her dad is so incensed by it that he rips off the tablecloth. It makes the jugs and bowls crash to the floor along with Dinah’s raisins.
    â€˜She’ll end up on the gallows, that girl!’ he says.
    Mealtimes are often high drama.
    But, in the street, when Lisa and Dinah are out together, they are united in sisterhood against adult busybodies who go in for personal remarks.
    â€˜All her strength is going into her hair,’ they say.
    They tend not to flatter Dinah by addressing her direct. They maintain a third-person mode, as if they were simply stage-whispering among themselves. But they make free contact with her skimpy blonde plaits, which tail off somewhere near her shoulder blades.
    â€˜She should get all her hair cut off,’ they say.
    The busybodies have just as much fun with Lisa, who was born with a malformed right arm. She has only one proper hand because the umbilical cord wound itself round the limb early on in the uterus and starved the hand of blood. The girls’ mum attributes this misfortune to a big wave that knocked her over when she went swimming once while she was expecting. So Lisa’s funny arm is all her fault. Lisa was born on mid-winter’s day and handed to her mother at feed-times so effectively swaddled that she didn’t discover the funny arm until the nurses told her about it two days later. But it helped that by then everyone in the hospital had been so charmed by Angel-face, who weighed eight pounds at birth and had