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until Mummy fought for me to come back in, or to be allowed to go to bed with the others when it was time.
    I didn’t mind it in the kitchen most times. It was quiet and the short, red checked curtains were so thin that even with them drawn I could see from the landing light outside. I would read the backs of boxes and jars of food, finding things to do: a box of Cornflakes weighs 225g, divide by 2 that’s? Add 7? Minus 15? Times 5? I practised school work: doing sums, memorising the spellings on the packaging and telling stories inside my head. If I got all the spellings right I would lick my finger and have a dip in the sugar bowl, smiling at how naughty I was being. Inside my head I’d say, ‘I don’t care,’ and pull my nightie off one shoulder and shrug it bare like Stella did to make my uncle laugh. It felt as if I’d got a friend there that I was talking to.
    Sometimes when I was sent to the kitchen Mummy would decide she’d had enough. Instead of whispering in to me when she came past to go to the toilet that she would ‘treat me tomorrow’, she would come barging out, saying, ‘No…no, I’m not having this,’ and switch on the light, talking in a loud voice and then whispering down to me, ‘It’s alright, it’ll give him a fright.’ She’d then return to her screaming voice, calling him names and trying to drag me back in behind her, my heart tumbling about in my chest as I tried to resist and grab things to hold on to, trying to stay where he told me.
    Occasionally she would win. But most times he jumped up and was there behind her, forcing me to get back, and Mummy would get hit instead. When she shouted louder than him and managed to pull me back into the front room, she would push me onto the end of the settee, telling the others to move up and to make room for me.
    ‘She’s staying there, right? I’m not having her treated any different to the others.’
    But he never stopped threatening things. Even if he had slept off his rage and woken up quiet, I wasn’t allowed to move on the settee or make a sound. Even if someone pinched me to move up I couldn’t pinch back, not while he was there.
    Soon the settee wasn’t big enough for five of us and one of us sometimes had to sit on the floor. I loved being up on the settee, squashed in amongst the others, but if my uncle was in a good mood Stella might say, ‘I’m too hot, sit on the floor, Anya.’ And my uncle would laugh with her and I’d have to sit on the floor.
    ‘No, she won’t,’ Mummy would say to Stella. ‘You sit on the floor, madam, and just shut up—I’m warning you.’
    I wished Mummy would let me fight my own battles. I was willing to sit on the floor if it meant I could have some peace.
    The others used to sit like statues in a row on the settee and refuse to look at me after fights, after he’d told them not to talk to me, that I wasn’t one of them. I knew they hated me for all the trouble I caused by being there, and for making them take sides when Mummy and their dad argued. I know they thought it was my fault. Me the troublemaker again.
    Later, in bed, I’d burrow down into last night’s wet sheets and lie there crying, trying to find a way to stop the tears and everyone picking on me. But when I woke up in wet sheets again the next morning they’d start up again. It would be years before I stopped wetting the bed most nights.
    If he woke up in his armchair and heard us whispering around him, trying not to wake him, he would fly into one of his rages and his mantra would start up again. ‘She’s out,’ he’d shout again, meaning me, his hand flying out, and the gold signet ring on his little finger busting my lip.
    ‘Don’t listen to him, okay,’ Mummy would say to me after the rows, when she came out to the kitchen to check I was okay. When I asked her what I’d done wrong and what I had to do so that I wasn’t in the way, like he said I was, she would pull me to her, ruffling my hair, telling me I