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on the top step in case somebody sees.
    The kitchen is quiet and empty. A cat thunders through the cat-flap, gulps down a plate of Whiskas, sneezes and bolts outside again. I shudder. Cats carry a lot of germs.
    Upstairs I can hear taps running, doors slamming and voices calling out to one another.
    Fran
, I think.
I’ll go upstairs and see if Fran has replied to my text
. Or maybe Dad’s tried to call me. That will kill, oh, about two minutes of this longest-ever morning. Then I can do my hand-washing again and work out what to do next.
    I creep upstairs. On the first floor, all the doors are open now except for the bathroom. I can hear the trickle of a bath being filled.
    I try not to look inside each room as I pass by, but it’s hard to resist.
    In the first one is the girl who took the yoghurt – Alice, bending over, tying up her trainers. She’s wearing dark-green baggy combats and a long-sleeved green top, even though it’s boiling hot outside. Where her hair falls away from her neck I see blue veins bulging out and the jut of her collarbone.
    In the room opposite there’s a blue bedmade up as if nobody’s slept in it. There’s a poster of Pamela Anderson tacked to the wall over the bed. No signs of life.
    The room adjacent to that one is about as messy as the kitchen was. There are books and CDs all over the floor and a bundle of rumpled clothes strewn across the bed. I recognise Lib’s green parka and smile. It’s a relief to see something familiar.
    The room at the end of the corridor has the door shut and the sound of a hairdryer coming from it. As that’s the room I heard snoring from last night, I reckon that this is Josh and the Doc’s room.
    I climb the narrow stairs to the floor where my little bedroom is.
    As I get to the top I notice that the door next to the bathroom is open a fraction.
    I peer through the crack, holding my breath.
    There’s a girl sitting in a window seat. Herlegs are bunched up underneath her and long wings of fair hair fall across her face, catching the sunlight.
    The girl is busy doing something with her right hand.
    I’m dazzled by the sun and struck by how pretty the girl is, a skinny blonde modern angel sitting in profile against an old sash window.
    There are pictures pinned all over the walls of this attic room. Some are done in an angry red blaze of paint, others are sharp-edged cartoons in black and white. With a shock of envy, I realise that the girl has painted them herself.
    She’s doing some sort of painting right now.
    I can’t see what she’s holding – her hand’s obscured by one wing of hair dipping down across her arm, but she is taking great care over her work.
    She’s so into what she’s doing that she hasn’t noticed the stream of red paint drippingfrom her brush on to the pale floorboards.
    I clear my throat. It’s stressing me out to see the watery red falling on to the white floor.
    The girl looks up, startled.
    Her face is narrow and hostile, sickly grey with a light sheen of sweat on the forehead.
    Something falls to the ground with a tinkle.
    She pulls her sleeves down, too late.
    The stuff dripping on to the floor is forming little red veins that trickle towards me.
    It’s not paint.

Chapter Eight
    I only once saw so much blood coming out of a person.
    On the day before Mum died I visited the hospital with Heather. We perched on the un-comfortable ridges of Mum’s special mattress.
    She wasn’t talking much, but her eyes spoke volumes. They glowed and sparkled as I talked about what I’d done at school and what I was planning to do over the weekend.
    ‘That’s nice, love,’ she said, when I’d finished going on.
    Then she shot up in bed, coughed up a great lungful of dark blood all over my white skirtand fell back down like one of those cardboard people you shoot at a fairground.
    Heather put her arm round me and led me out of the ward while the nurse cleaned Mum up.
    The skirt already had a pattern of deep red flowers so Heather