And so I’m lying on my bed, reading, and working out how I’m going to get back over to the old house now that Grandpa Byron’s chained up his moped, when Carly walks in.

Let me tell you about The Stepsister From Hell, because she’s about to feature a bit more significantly in this story.

To say I hate her would be unfair, but I think she hates me. I think she hates Mum, as well, and Grandpa Byron. And so far as I can tell, she hates her dad too, but because he gives her money she isn’t so open about it. With him, she just tuts a lot, rolls her eyes and curls her lip behind his back.

Mum reckons she just hates the world because it took her mum away, and she’s angry and resentful, and that instead of disliking her I should feel sorry for her, and that I should remember she almost certainly thinks we are invading her space. I try to remember that, I really do. But sometimes she makes it quite hard.

Take the going-to-school thing. She’s a year ahead of me at St Eddie’s, but apart from once in my first week – once! – she has not travelled with me to school. (And that one time, as soon as she got on the bus she sat away from me with Noa Menko and the girl with the harelip.)

So now I usually get taken in by Grandpa Byron.

I think Carly is actually, probably, quite pretty, at least when she doesn’t do her emo stuff. She’s got shiny black hair which she makes even blacker with artificial colour, and then puts loads of stuff on her eyes, but when I once said she looked emo, she sneered at me and said she was a goth not an emo, but I don’t think she’s either really, not that I’m an expert. I think she just likes wearing black because she reckons it makes her look thinner.

When she walks into my room, I am stunned. She has never – and I really think it is never – come into my bedroom, and in she walks without knocking, of course.

“Hi,” I say.

She doesn’t reply, but sort of half-nods at me with half-closed eyes, like she’s been practising in the mirror how to look mysterious and threatening.

To give her her due, it’s working.

She wanders over to my desk and picks up a clay model of Yoda that I made years ago but I still really like. She turns it over in her hands, then puts it back.

She pulls out the desk chair and turns it round. She starts to try and sit down on it backwards, facing the back, like they do in movies, but she’s got a skirt on which makes the move difficult, and besides, it would expose her knickers, so she opts for sitting sideways instead, and then she looks at me with her head on one side.

I know I’m not going to like this. I mean, people don’t behave this way if they’re about to say, “Guess what, I’ve bought you a present,” or, “Congratulations, you’ve won first prize.”

“Al?” she says.

“Yes?”

“Where did you go last night?”