Thomas stayed in the freezer room for a while, thinking about the phone call from Father Sholtham. He couldn’t say how long, but it felt like a long time.

Squeak was an altar boy but he wasn’t religious, he said he did it for the trips. He was devout like Lars was. For Lars religion was like a membership of an afterlife country club: he despised people who weren’t Catholic, and really believed they were going to hell and good riddance to them. Thomas struggled against the reflex to prayer, especially now, when everything was so mixed up. Maybe Squeak was going through that too. Maybe he genuinely confessed to a drunken priest the morning after. It was just possible that Squeak had found his faith again in a moment of despair. Thomas shook his head. Squeak was scheming. He was scheming even before they met on the beach. Squeak didn’t want to get caught. He was so far ahead of him, Thomas was defeated before the fight began.

He stood up and walked heavily up to the bright kitchen.

Theresa still hadn’t phoned. Thomas glanced at the wall clock. Ten past seven. She might call yet, but she wasn’t in a hurry. He’d have called her hours ago, if it was up to him. The lightness of the morning in town left him, making everything seem bleaker.

He poured himself a Coke from the bottle in the fridge, drank it down and went back upstairs, gathering himself on the traipse up the staircase, getting his story right for Moira. He’d say the phone call was the girlfriend in town’s father. He wanted to ask Thomas about him meeting her because she’d been late back to school lessons and the father’d had to write her a letter explaining her absence from PE. Thomas supposed that’s what happened at day school. You had to write to them about everything. The PE detail made the lie more believable, he thought, and it had to be good because Moira was so used to being lied to.

He walked back into the bedroom and knew immediately that he’d walked into the middle of a catastrophe. They looked so utterly detached from each other they might have been in different rooms.

Moira was sitting on the edge of the bed, facing away from Ella, pale and scared, as if something horrible and sexual had happened. He thought of the depressed girl from Kiev in the miserable room in Amsterdam.

Ella was over by the window, behind the bed, looking out over the lawn.

Moira looked up at Thomas, ashen, and said why didn’t he take Ella downstairs to the family room and maybe they could watch a movie together? Confused, Thomas sat down next to her, put his hand on her back, tried to read beyond the horror. “Mum?”

Moira attempted a smile. “Ella’s…” but she didn’t know what Ella was.

Thomas stood up and looked at his sister’s reflection in the window, just beginning to form as the sun set. She was crying, her mouth open, turned down like a mask from a Greek drama.

She began to flap her right hand, small shakes, like she’d eaten something hot, and then the shakes got bigger and she started hitting the glass on the window, louder and louder with the back of her hand. It was time for this nonsense to stop.

“Ella?”

She didn’t listen. She started to say something but he couldn’t make it out over the noise of her hitting the glass.

Thomas went to her, yanked her shoulder, turning her around to face him and shouting “Stop it!” but she didn’t. She carried on crying and shaking her hand and upsetting everyone. So Thomas shouted again, even louder, “Ella! Fucking stop it! We’re all sad, for Christ’s sake. You can’t make it all about you!”

He was feeling pleased because that was exactly the problem, he’d articulated it perfectly. But she was shaking, her whole body trembling now, as if she was getting into it. Thomas raised his hand and slapped her hard across the face.

Ella stopped shaking.

Thomas glanced up and saw himself in the side window. He was tall and broad-chested, the sinews on his arms tight, looming over the small girl. His face was twisted with annoyance. He looked like Lars.

Ella dissolved to the floor, arms in front of her. He looked down. Her wrists were scarred, badly scarred with long scratches up and down them.

He tried to pick her up. She flopped onto the floor again and curled around his ankle, sobbing, tears rolling into her yellow hair at the temple, her cheek maddened by the slap.

Thomas bent down, crouching right down on his haunches and waited until Ella got tired and stopped writhing, until she was staring at his ankle, seeing nothing. He knew that this was the real Ella.

Suddenly, he understood the worried calls from the school over the year. This was why Lars and Moira went to visit her so much more than they went to see him. This was why they dropped their voices when they spoke about her. This was why they kept them apart. She had been ill for a long, long time. She was mad and baffling and scary. He looked at Moira and he understood why she made certain that he was the first one home.

They should have told him. He didn’t know, he thought she was snooty and spoiled but he didn’t know that she was nuts. They should have told him.

He touched Ella’s shoulder, the way Doyle had tried to touch him, and he said to her, “I’m sorry, Ella, I thought you were faking.” And then he didn’t say anything after that.

Ella waited until Moira went to the bathroom and shut the door. Then she slowly got up and stood slack, occasional tears dripping from her nose onto the floor, leaving deep dents in the thick carpet.

“Come on,” he said, and took her hand and led her out of the bedroom. She saw her own door, her bedroom door, and stopped, bringing a toe towards it, pointing at the bottom of the door frame and Thomas said, “Do you want to go in there?”

But she didn’t answer and he was afraid to leave her alone so he took her downstairs, helping her on the steps, walking in front of her, holding both her hands as if she was a very old lady. He saw the ridges on her wrists then, and saw that some were very old and healed white and some were so new they were still sealed with crusty scabs.

They were at the bottom of the stairs when Moira called down to them that she was tired and going to bed and they’d sort this out tomorrow. All right? Thomas? Darling?

“OK, Mum.” He heard her shut her door tight and imagined her locking it, though he didn’t actually know whether there was a lock on that door.

In the family room they sat next to each other, squashed up shoulder to shoulder on the frosty white sofa, watching Mission Impossible II. Ella sat with her hands palm up, showing her scars, and Thomas felt like tutting because it was so dramatic but he looked at her face and saw that she just didn’t give a shit if he saw them or not. She didn’t speak but she nodded to herself at the movie when the characters peeled their faces off.

“You’re not well,” said Thomas as the credits rolled.

Ella dropped her head to her chest as though she was very tired. Thomas didn’t think he had ever seen anyone as sad as her.

“Ella?”

She didn’t look at him.

“It’s all going to be all right. I’m going to look after you now.”

She didn’t answer but he could see that she had heard and understood and that it mattered to her that he had said that. He could do that for her. He could be Theresa for her, a proper parent, someone who was there all the time and made sure she didn’t do anything to hurt herself.

He walked her upstairs, to her rooms, his arm through her arm, guiding with his elbow. They walked through the pink sitting room and through to the bed. She sat down on the edge and he lifted her little feet and made her lie down. He sat in the other room and left the door open, watching her chest rise and fall until she fell asleep.

Thomas put the lights off in there but kept the side light on in the sitting room and left the door ajar. He stopped outside for a moment. Through the master bedroom door Moira’s television laughed loudly. He knocked but she didn’t answer.

And Theresa still hadn’t phoned.