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didn’t want any because I was fat but she said nonsense and gave me a huge slice and I ate it cos I did want it really and now I feel bad because eating
it will make me fatter and I need EVERYTHING on my side to counteract the year ten girls knowing Sam likes me and Sam getting put off.
    And now I’m upstairs and it’s very quiet. And I feel SAD, SAD, SAD and everything’s awful because it’s my birthday and I didn’t see Sam.
    And Lish wasn’t here.
    And Mum is upset.
    And Daddy has gone.

August 2014
    I can’t make sense of it, even after two hours. How can Dee Dee be dead? Gary’s girlfriend, Iveta, is hysterical, her wails echoing around the house, but Rose and I
are numb, unable to take it in. Jed is in shock too, white-faced with disbelief, virtually speechless. He brushes away my sympathy, saying he has to call Dee Dee’s mother. I don’t hear
their conversation but afterwards Jed comments only that his ex will be here as soon as she can get a flight, then retreats into a tightly wound silence. I cannot imagine what this is like for him.
Or for Lish, who withdraws to his bedroom and locks the door. Much to my amazement it is Gary who takes charge – and brilliantly. He manages to contact the emergency services and oversees
first the doctor’s visit then, immediately after, that of the local police. Inspecteur Chabrol is wiry, fox-faced and middle-aged, with greying sideburns and a sharply cut suit. He and his
colleagues are soon questioning everyone in the house. They start with the most fluent French speakers: Gary and Lish. In among all this, Gary somehow manages to find time to console Iveta, who is
still weeping, while Rose and I sit huddled together. I call Martin but he and Cameron were leaving port at dawn and must be out at sea as both their phones are out of range.
    ‘This is so terrible,’ Rose whispers through her tears. ‘Poor, poor Jed, to lose a child.’
    And poor Dee Dee. It is incomprehensible that she isn’t in the next room or out by the pool, her chubby legs tucked under her on a lounger. Rose and I sit in silence, waiting to be
interviewed, while Jed talks to Inspecteur Chabrol. Lish is back in his bedroom.
    ‘I keep thinking back to when I got the call from the hospital about Mum and Dad,’ Rose says between sniffs.
    I fall silent. I’ve heard Rose talk about this moment many times: how she was coming home from her gap-year waitressing job when she was summoned to the hospital and told our parents had
been in a car accident, how she called the school to have Martin and I taken from our classes and asked one of Mum’s friends to pick us up and bring us to meet her at the hospital.
    Rose can describe everything that day in minute detail. My memories, on the other hand, are smudged. I was eleven, in my first term at secondary school. I remember I was in Maths and very bored
and initially and self-importantly delighted to be called out of class. Then I remember the strained eyes of my head teacher and the sense that something must be very wrong for her to have softened
her voice so much. Later, I remember Martin holding my hand as we walked into the hospital and Rose’s tear-stained cheeks as she held out her arms to us and whispered the truth in our ears:
that our parents had died in a side-on collision with a drunk driver.
    I remember very little else from that time – the funeral is a blur, my memories of the next month consist of Rose in tears, Martin fighting someone at school, all the adults looking at me
with pity and the many, many hushed conversations behind closed doors about who was to look after us in the absence of any directions from our parents. Rose insisted she could manage – that
she would postpone uni for a couple of years. Mum and Dad’s friends were worried that she was throwing her own chances away, but Rose insisted and, backed by me and Martin, was officially
awarded guardianship of us both.
    Looking back I think it was selfish to lay