Kitty had got used to the sound of crying in the house since her father had gone.
Mum made no attempt to hide her sobbing and most evenings, as she sat in her armchair in the parlour, she’d put down her sewing and let grief wash over her.
Kitty would go to her then, knowing that words were useless because nothing could bring him back. The clock on the mantelpiece would strike nine and then ten but their loss had no respect for seconds or minutes or hours. They were caught by it, suspended like flies in amber.
The cries coming from upstairs grew louder, but it was too early for Mum to be back from work.
Kitty hesitated for a split second on the stairs, catching sight of her reflection in the hallway mirror. She’d glanced at herself hundreds of times going up and down those stairs in all the years they’d lived in Lily Avenue. It had been her little secret before she went to school, checking if her collar was straight and her unruly auburn hair tied neatly with a velvet ribbon, just the way the teacher liked it.
So much had changed in the past year. She didn’t care one jot what she looked like these days. People stared at her and so she’d got used to staring back at them, almost daring them to mention her father’s name.
She’d reached the top of the stairs now. The sobbing was coming from her little brother Harry’s room. Kitty pushed open the bedroom door and Harry looked up at her, grey eyes filled with shame and anger, his lip cut and bleeding and a livid purple bruise darkening on his cheek. ‘I don’t want you to see me like this, Kit,’ he howled, hurling himself face down on the bed. ‘Just leave me alone, will you?’
She ran to him and kneeled at his side, watching his shoulders heave with each sob. The back of his shirt was streaked with dirt where he’d been knocked to the ground.
‘I promised Dad before he went: I won’t leave you ever, so don’t be a soft lad and keep asking me to go,’ she said, fighting back tears of her own. ‘Who did this to you? Was it the Jesmond Dene gang again, that bunch of layabouts?’
He turned his face to the wall and her hand found his. He didn’t speak but he clasped her fingers tightly, just as he had the first time she’d held him, when he was just a baby.
‘It’s you and me, Harry, against all of them,’ she whispered. ‘We’re family, don’t ever forget that.’