Rich Uncle Brian says newborn babies look like bulldogs. Most of the time, I know what he means. The hanging jowls and lolling heads.

But Sky was different. Her cheeks were rounded and covered with soft down. When I ran my hand along her cheek it was like stroking a peach, faintly warm and the texture of satin. She smelled of powder and milk and her. I would bury my nose in her neck and fill my nostrils. I inhaled her while she made snuffling noises.

Sky was my sister and I first saw her when I was five. When I think back to that time, I picture it in snapshots. Separate images connected by blanks, like white, empty spaces in a photograph album. Only occasionally do they spool together to form a story. I remember looking up at Mum in the kitchen. She was doing something with flour and her hands were dusty so she couldn’t touch me. But she was smiling and one white hand rested on the swell of her stomach. I remember Mum and Dad talking about the new baby and the changes ahead. They tried to make me feel comfortable about what was going to happen but they needn’t have bothered. I was excited, not because I knew what to expect [I was five. You don’t know what to expect at five. You don’t know what to expect at twelve. Maybe you never know what to expect], but because our household was alive with happiness. It bubbled and made us glow. The sun was brighter then, the grass greener, the clouds whiter.

So maybe Sky did look like a bulldog and it’s only my memory that has re-formed her. I don’t think so, however. I have photographs, and though they sometimes lie, I do not believe so in this case. Not in this case.

I remember nothing of Mum going into labour. I cannot remember Dad driving to the hospital. My first sight of Sky, though, is vivid still. A tiny arm poked from a tiny blanket. It was fleshy and rounded and ended in a clump of perfect fingers. It was hard to believe that a fingernail could be so small yet so beautifully finished. Mum sat up in a bed so white it glowed. It was as if she was partly buried in a snow drift. Her hair was wet and stuck to her head. One dark tendril curled against a pale cheek. She held something small and pink against her chest. The baby, too, had a lick of dark, wet hair that clung to her skin. I remember thinking that this small thing was a part of my Mum, chipped off in some way. The hair was the connection.

‘Say hello to your sister, Pumpkin,’ said Mum. Her voice was smiling, but I couldn’t take my eyes from the baby. I didn’t say hello. I simply stared.

Dad leaned in. He put his index finger against the baby’s fist. Her fingers curled and then clamped down. She clutched his finger as if her life was anchored to it. It was then that my heart first lurched and something powerful was born within me. Such a tiny thing. Such a tiny, perfect thing.

‘Do you want to hold her, Candice?’ said Dad. I shook my head.

‘It’s okay,’ he added. ‘We’ll help you. You won’t drop her.’

I stared.

Dad leaned in again.

‘Frances,’ he said. ‘Meet your big sister Candice.’

Mum shifted her grip and turned the baby’s face towards me. Her eyelids were partly closed, her lips an exaggerated bow, impossible eyelashes against impossible skin. And then she opened her eyes and looked straight into mine. I was told afterwards that newborn babies cannot focus properly, that it is something they learn later. I do not believe it. She looked into my eyes and saw something there. Hers were a pale blue, though other colours shifted within them. I felt I was staring into someone who had no end, that the mind behind the gaze went on forever. I was staring into the sky and I knew that was her name. Frances was a label, but Sky was who she was. Who she will always be.

Rich Uncle Brian lived in a large house with eight bedrooms that no one else ever stayed in. He was alone. Mum, Dad, Sky and I lived in a small house with only two bedrooms. It is where we live still. Mum and Dad put a cot in their bedroom and Sky slept there for her first six months. She woke at least three times a night because she was hungry. Sometimes she woke when she wasn’t hungry and Dad walked her round and round the house, her head peeping over his shoulder. He jogged a little as he walked so her head bounced slightly. He murmured to her. I followed him. Whenever Sky woke, I woke. Occasionally, I would wake slightly before she did, or maybe it would be more accurate to say slightly before she cried. Perhaps we always woke at the same time. But I knew when I glanced at my bedside clock and saw it was 12.30 or 2.55 or 4.13 that she was awake. I’d climb out of bed and go into Mum and Dad’s room, just as Sky was starting to sniffle and cry. At first, Mum and Dad took me back to bed, but it was never any use. Even when they forced me to stay in my room, I couldn’t sleep until she’d drifted off. After a while they stopped trying to keep me out of the room. I watched when Mum breastfed her. I followed behind Dad when he took Sky on her jiggly tour of the house. I helped with the changing duties. I became good at cleaning her tiny bottom and fitting it with a fresh nappy.

Sky smiled whenever she saw me. She smiled even when she was too young to smile, when I was told it was merely wind contorting the face. She smiled.

‘Pumpkin, aren’t you tired?’ said Mum one morning over Weet-Bix.

‘No, Mummy,’ I said.

‘It’s just that all of us are having broken sleep, sweetie. Why don’t you leave Frances to us and get a decent night’s sleep?’

‘I just wake up,’ I said. ‘Whenever she wakes, I do. And I can’t go back to sleep then, Mummy. I just can’t. So do you know what I think we should do?’ I talked a lot more then. I didn’t even wait for Mum to reply. ‘I think we should put Sky’s cot in my room. She should sleep with me. That way Daddy might get more sleep. He told me he’s nearly fallen asleep when he’s been driving and that is bad. I’ll wake you up when Sky wakes up, so it’ll be the same as now, except I’ll get to sleep in the same room as her. Please, Mummy? Please?’

Mum and Dad exchanged a look, but didn’t say anything. And another two months went by before they moved Sky’s cot into my room.

She died four weeks later.

It would be good in a way – a literary way, I suppose – to say all the details of that evening have been fixed permanently into my memory. Or, given that I had a special bond with Sky, to say I had some warning about what would happen when I fell asleep on the fourteenth of June, two days before my sixth birthday. But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.

Mum read me a book as always. She kissed me on the forehead and told me to sleep well and to make sure the bed bugs didn’t bite. Dad tickled me on my side. Then they both went to Sky’s cot and bent over her sleeping form. My nightlight cast a pale red glow over the scene. I think I remember that Mum’s and Dad’s hands felt towards each other and their fingers entwined as they watched their youngest daughter. But maybe that is just memory playing tricks. Memory does that. And I was tired. My eyes were heavy and closing even then. The room was hazy somehow, as if I were seeing under water. Then, nothing. I woke so violently that I sat up in bed in one movement. My heart was thudding, the pulse of blood loud in my ears. The nightlight still cast its rosy glow, but the moon also washed my bedroom in silver. I glanced at my bedside clock, but the numerals were flashing on 2.22. A power cut maybe. I had no idea of the time. I put my feet on the floor, snuggled my toes into ridiculous slippers that were in the shape of bunnies’ heads and padded over to Sky’s cot.

She lay on her back and her eyes were open. Moon-shadows and nightlights play tricks, as memories do, and for a moment I thought I saw her gaze shift and settle on my face. But the moment passed and I saw… nothing. The blue of her eyes was as intense as ever, but now there was no depth within them. It was as if the sky had become a shield, a plate of colour that was in one dimension only. I touched her face. It was warm, but my fingers sensed the heat departing.

Then all I could hear was screaming. I suppose it was mine.

No one talks about that night. I suppose there isn’t a great deal to say. Many months later, Mum and Dad took me to a man who tried to get me to say something about it, but I had lost interest in talking by then. After a while, we carried on as a family. Not like everything was the same. It wasn’t and we knew that. But we carried on because … well, what choice do we have?

I’m twelve years old and smart, apparently. I know what people think. That I blame myself for what happened to Sky and that my strange behaviour stems from guilt. I’d put pressure on Mum and Dad to let Sky sleep in my bedroom. Would she have died if she’d stayed in Mum and Dad’s room? Was it all, in some peculiar fashion, a way of punishing myself for imaginary crimes? It would explain a lot. My writing of notes, rather than talking to people I don’t know well. Some of my… obsessions.

But I don’t blame myself. It wasn’t my fault. Sky died of cot death. Sudden infant death syndrome is the medical term, though that explains nothing because no one knows why it happens. It just does. For no reason. No one’s to blame.

Unfortunately the human mind doesn’t work that way. Logic is no good here. Candice feels she is to blame and that is the important thing. But all I can do is repeat: I know it wasn’t my fault.

But it is unbearably sad.

Families are fragile. Mine did not die when Sky did, but it took a battering and came out bruised and limping. It was the start of when things fell apart.

Mum’s breast cancer. Dad’s increasing distance from everything except the computers in his shed and a faintly buzzing silhouette in the sky.

I never saw them touch hands after that night. Now I am surrounded by unhappiness. Mum. Dad. Even Rich Uncle Brian.

That is not my fault either.

But maybe I can do something about it.

Before the last traces of warmth flee my family too.