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cheats too. “If we aren’t going to play properly,” I say without regarding anyone, “there’s no point to the game.” Not addressing somebody specific gives me a sense of including more people than are seated at the table, and no amount of glancing at the mirror can rid me of the impression. I’ve never been so glad to lose a game. “Will you excuse me?” I blurt as my chair stumbles backwards. “I’ve had quite a day. Time for bed.”
    My struggles to sleep only hold me awake. When at last the twins are coaxed up to their room and the adults retreat to theirs, I’m still attempting to fend off the memory of my final visit to my aunt’s house. She was ill in bed, so shortly after the game of Snakes and Ladders that I felt responsible. She sent my mother out for cakes, though the remains of several were going stale in a box by her bed. There were crumbs on the coverlet and around her mouth, which looked swollen almost bloodlessly pale. I thought there was too much of her to be able to move until she dug her fingers into the bed and, having quivered into a sitting position that dislodged a musty shawl from her distended shoulders, reached for me. I took her hand as a preamble to begging forgiveness, but her cold spongy grasp felt as if it was on the way to becoming a substance other than flesh, which overwhelmed me with such panic that I couldn’t speak. Perhaps she was aware of dying of her overloaded heart, since she fixed me with eyes that were practically buried in her face. “I’ll be watching,” she said and expelled a breath that sounded close to a word. It was almost too loose to include consonants—it seemed as soft as her hand—but it could have been “Peep.” I was terrified that it might also be her last breath, since it had intensified her grip on me. Eventually she drew another rattling breath but gave no sign of relaxing her clutch. Her eyes held me as a time even longer than a nightmare seemed to ooze by before I heard my mother letting herself into the house, when I was able to snatch my hand free and dash for the stairs. In less than a week my aunt was dead.
    If I didn’t see her again, being afraid to was almost as bad. Now that she was gone I thought she could be anywhere and capable of reading all my thoughts, especially the ones I was ashamed to have. I believed that thinking of her might bring her, perhaps in yet worse a form. I’d gathered that the dead lost weight, but I wasn’t anxious to imagine how. Wouldn’t it let her move faster? All these fears kept me company at night into my adolescence, when for a while I was even more nervous of seeing her face over the end of my bed. That never happened, but when at last I fall uneasily asleep I wake to see a shock of red hair duck below the footboard.
    I’m almost quick enough to disguise my shriek as mirth once I realise that the glimpse included two small heads. “Good God,” Bertie shouts from downstairs, “who was that?”
    “Only me,” I call. “Just a dream.”
    The twins can’t hide their giggles. “No, it was us,” cries Geraldine.
    At least I’ve headed them off from greeting me with Beryl’s word. Their father and to a lesser extent Paula give me such probing looks over breakfast that I feel bound to regain some credibility as an adult by enquiring “How was your search for investments?”
    “Unfinished business,” Bertie says.
    “We were too busy wondering where you could have got to,” Paula says.
    “I hope I’m allowed to redeem myself. Where would you two like to go today?”
    “Shopping,” Geraldine says at once.
    “Yes, shopping,” Gerald agrees louder.
    “Make sure you keep your phones switched on,” their father says and frowns at me. “Do you still not own one?”
    “There aren’t that many people for me to call.”
    Paula offers to lend me hers, but the handful of unfamiliar technology would just be another cause for concern. At least we don’t need to pass my aunt’s house—we