I smile but I don’t want him to be those other colours he’s mentioned. Pink suits him, it somehow manages to keep hers less angry, like the antacid TV ad where the white medicine puts out the flame of the red burning chest. His colour puts out fires everywhere.

  ‘What about Ollie?’ he asks.

  I watch Ollie. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, Coco Pops in a bowl, a messy bedhead and sleepy eyes, crashing wrestlers into each other. I don’t want to say, shake my head.

  His colour is usually the same as hers. She gives it to him.

  ‘An aura migraine,’ Hugh reads from his computer. ‘Do you get migraines?’

  ‘What’s a migraine?’

  ‘A really bad headache.’

  I nod. ‘All the time now.’ I can’t remember a day since these colours appeared when I haven’t had a headache. I just want to go to my room, pull the curtains and lie in the darkness, but I don’t because I don’t want to be like her.

  ‘It’s a recurring headache that strikes after or at the same time as sensory disturbances called aura. These can include flashes of light, blind spots, zigzag lines that float across your vision, shimmering spots or stars, or tingling in your hand or face. Does that sound familiar to you?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘It’s like an electrical or chemical wave that processes visual signals and causes these … what you call colours.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You need to go to a neurologist,’ he says, scrolling and reading. ‘They’d give you an eye exam, a head CT scan, or an MRI. They recommend medicine, or avoid stressful situations, learn how to relax. Get more sleep, eat better. Drink lots of water.’

  ‘I can drink more water,’ I say.

  We both smile because it’s not really that funny.

  ‘So,’ he says, spinning around in his chair to face me. ‘That’s probably what it is.’

  I nod along. Aura migraines. Probably.

  I drink what feels like endless glasses of water, trying to flush it out like it’s a cold, but it doesn’t seem to help. Instead, the colours intensify with each passing week.

  Lily says we’re not going to see a doctor about a headache and tosses a box of Paracetamol at me.

  The colours move from my family to everyone else. It makes me want to stop looking at people. Their swirling colours dancing around, twirling, flashing and flickering, at different paces and rhythms is distracting. It makes me feel nauseous, sometimes dizzy. The brightness, the constant light strains my eyes and gives me a headache. It’s like hundreds of people are broadcasting their own radio stations around me. The air around them fizzes then breaches and collides with mine when they come close.

  It starts to happen with my best friend Emma. Always fun and exciting, her giddiness used to be addictive but now she exhausts me. Her colours are wild and fast, flashing yellows and hyperactive greens, sometimes zigzagging like lightning forks, as though she’s dipped in something toxic. That, mixed with her speed of speech, her high energy, how she always wants to control the games we play, our role-playing characters, what I say, how we play them, drains me.

  ‘Come on, Alice,’ she says, pulling my arm roughly. ‘Get up. Let’s play outside.’

  ‘But we just came inside.’

  Has she always jumped from game to game every three minutes? I need her to focus, I need her to be still and quiet. I need calm. I need a friend. But I can’t do it anymore. I move further and further away from her. It hurts but I’m actually relieved when she moves on to another group of girls and I escape torturous afternoons of hyperactive controlling girls with headache-inducing power-play colours.

  I see a dark murky greenish-black colour floating in the air by a bush. I walk to where the colour hovers, use my foot to move aside a weed and find a dying rat, its leg twitching, the blood on it still wet.

  I’m alone on the walk to school. Hugh has gone on ahead with his friends and Ollie trails behind me, even more distant with me than usual after the visit from Social. I don’t think he trusts me; he thinks I’m trying to break up the family. School is becoming a nightmare. There are colours all around me, all the time, from every living thing. Thirty people in my class. Hundreds outside at breaktime. Not to mention the people I’ve to walk past to get to and from school. I dodge every single one of them so their colours don’t get on me. It’s exhausting. The colours are so vivid and busy I sometimes can’t concentrate on what teachers are saying. Colours are quiet but they feel so loud and distracting that I can’t hear. It’s like somebody constantly interrupting me when I’m in a conversation, a niggly naggy constant tap on the shoulder.

  I start wearing sunglasses walking to and from school. Some kids make comments at first, then stop when word spreads I’m special, or partially blind. Then I become so used to them, I wear them outside at lunchtime. It doesn’t make the colours disappear, but it does dull everything and makes it less intense. I sit in the quiet area, reserved for kids who aren’t feeling well, who have a broken arm or leg, or some sort of special needs. My special need is to be away from everyone. Every single person.

  ‘Breaktime is over, Alice, sunglasses off and in your bag,’ Ms Crowley says. She’s from Cork and she sings as she talks. Every day she wears a different tea dress and cardigan and large red-rimmed glasses with matching lipstick. She wears a lot of colours, maybe to brighten up the dullness that surrounds her.

  ‘I can’t,’ I say.

  I just can’t do it today, I can’t take the shades off in class. My head is aching so much I feel my temples pulsating. I wonder if I looked in the mirror would I see them move.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s too bright in here.’

  Some people laugh, which does nothing for my defence. It’s an overcast day and everything, including the exterior of the school is grey, but this only makes people’s colours brighter, or at least more visible to me.

  She rolls her eyes. ‘Off.’

  And she moves on.

  I keep them on. She writes on the board and when she turns around and sees my glasses still on, she loses it. A surprising explosion of anger that seems to come from nowhere sparks over her head. As she yells at me to take them off again, a bright metallic red, as bright as her lipstick, flickers around her and it reminds me of one of those fly-killer machines at the local kebab shop that flies fly into and it zaps them and kills them.

  I feel Lily before I hear or see her. She has the ability to change the air – and not in a good way like Hugh does. At the sound of a key in the door, Ollie jumps up from the couch, excited. He’s been anxious since we came home and she wasn’t here. We’re not used to her not being here, but unlike him, I was pleased. I don’t know where he gets this yearning to be with her and around her.

  ‘Mum,’ he says, hurrying to the door.

  I’m surprised he isn’t flattened against the wall with the force she pushes the door open. And then she slams it so hard it feels like the entire house shakes. Ollie quickly backs away from her and returns to the couch. I try to make myself as small as I can. Maybe the smaller I am, the less angry she’ll be.

  ‘I’ve never had to go to the school for Hugh,’ she says, spitting with anger. ‘Not once in my life. You’re eleven years old and behaving like a little brat. I don’t have time for this,’ she shouts, and I hold back on the comment I want to make. She has all the time for everything. She doesn’t do anything, ever; it’s difficult to recognise her without the couch attached to her backside. It’s not the first time she’s been called to the school about me, with two suspensions she was forced to stop ignoring their letters and pretend to be a responsible parent.

  Red metallic flickers above her as she yells at me. Zap. Another fly dead. Maybe she picked it up from Ms Crowley and carried it all the way home with her. I watch it, intrigued, not really listening to her.

  It’s been three years since the colours started and I get it by now. I know the colours are linked to people’s moods, though I’m still trying to figure it all out. Like why sometimes there’s a colour around someone when they’re not behaving as someone with that colour should usually behave. There’s an algorithm I’m missing. Like Ms Harris at reception who smiles at everyone, is sunny and upbeat, laughs and makes jokes, but has untrusting mustard yellow above her belly, below her boobs. Who it seems she is and who she is clashes. I think of all of this as Lily screams at me. The front door is still wide open and everybody will hear it now, the entire street. About me being so disobedient and so stupid. How I will fail all my exams, how I’ll never be anything.

  I’m not reacting as she wants me to. I’m not crying, apologising, fighting back. She wants me to engage with her dramatics, to be upset and disappointed like her. The red around her darkens and gets larger – like a gunshot wound when blood gushes out and spreads across a white T-shirt. I don’t know how to stop this from happening; she is completely uncontrollable and unpredictable. Her colours aren’t like Hugh’s; hers change all the time and swing quickly from cold blues to hot, angry reds. They also take a different form. Hugh’s are a calm haze, hers swirl and spit. The red swirl moves towards Ollie, who watches TV as if she’s not there, as if she’s not exploding before our very eyes. I’ve never seen it move like this, as though it’s alive and looking for someone to attach itself to.

  ‘Ollie, move!’ I say in warning, in the middle of her shouting.

  The red is everywhere. Sparking like fire. I want to block my eyes. I close them. She yells louder and I feel the heat of her. I open my eyes but the red is hot and feels like flames, so I cover my eyes with my hands.

  I hear smashing and I open my eyes to see her standing on an open carton of eggs that she’s just bought. Smashing them to pieces, her face furious, everything in her twisted in rage. Why wouldn’t I just take my sunglasses off in class when I was asked? Everyone gets headaches, they’re no big deal, stop looking for attention. And then she’s gone.

  The red mist follows after her, like the trail of a gown. Some of it stays in the room, hangs high in the air like stale cigarette smoke. It drifts greedily to Ollie. I watch it, my heart pounding. This living, breathing thing looking for someone else to live off. It attaches to Ollie instantly. He stands up, a ball of utter fury. Eight years old and utterly consumed with so much rage his body is straight and rigid with it, like an ironing board.

  ‘I hate you,’ he yells at me, anger trapped in his chest and throat. He doesn’t sound himself, more like a possessed little demon. ‘You ruin everything!’

  He throws the remote control at me and I’m so unprepared, I’m too late to dodge it. It hits me in the face, just below my eye. It turns a nasty colour as the afternoon goes by.

  ‘Did she do that?’ Hugh wants to know, later, when he’s home.

  I shake my head. ‘It was an accident.’

  I thought protecting Ollie would go towards him learning to trust me, but it’s like the ease with which I do it is all the proof he needs that I’m a liar.

  When I wake up, my eye is half-closed, like a peach that I’ve left in the bottom of my school bag for too long. I tell a concerned Ms Crowley that I have a migraine and she lets me wear my sunglasses in school that day.

  ‘I’m going to open a pancake truck,’ Lily says, her cheeks flushed, glowing with health, her brow sweaty from all the egg-beating she’s doing.

  I don’t know who this woman is who claims to be my mother, but I like her. Full of energy and vigour, of business ideas and hope.

  ‘I’ll make pancakes at festivals, crêpes. You can fill a crêpe, you see,’ she says. ‘More diverse. Broadens the market and the opportunity to make a profit.’ There’s sweat on her chest, under her arms. She’s stirring and stirring her third batter bowl.

  She makes one for me, folds it into quarters. It’s so thin, at first I can almost see through it. It’s delicious.

  ‘The filling options are endless,’ she says, blowing her hair from her sweaty face. ‘Savoury or sweet. Or just with icing sugar. Banana, caramel, strawberry, Nutella … Then the savoury: cheese and ham, Mexican … Here, taste this.’

  She places another one down before me and starts making more. It’s still delicious, but by the fourth I don’t think I can take another bite. They keep coming, one after another on to my plate and I pass them to Ollie. She keeps breaking eggs, measuring milk, sifting flour, pinching salt. Using four pans now to make them in multiples, working out how many customers she can serve at once, and in an entire day or night.

  I can’t eat any more, and as she turns around to place another pancake on the top of the pile I can no longer eat, I prepare for her to lose her temper, but the new pancake lands on the old pancake without a word. It continues: eight pancakes piled high on my plate. I quickly realise it doesn’t matter if I comment or not, if I join in with the conversation or not. It doesn’t matter if I’m there or not. She’s talking but not conversing, she’s in the flow of something, something is happening in her head, something great and grand and life-changing. My excitement fizzles a little. She is manic in her thoughts and movement, behind the eyes there’s no great connection with her.

  Her colours are fascinating: deep purples and indigos appear to mimic her movements. They swirl and mix, changing consistency as if they’re in the bowl with the eggs, flour and milk.

  She lists the festivals she can go to, talks about the different types of vans, what equipment she’ll need inside the van, where she can get one, who she knows. Van costs against ingredient costs; the numbers of eggs, the weight of flour and sugar. All that against the profit. She talks and talks, a mile a minute. Breaks more eggs, mixes more batter, greases more pans. Beads of sweat drip from her forehead and chest.

  I’ve stopped licking the bowls, I’ve stopped tasting the pancakes. It’s midnight on a Friday; Hugh is out working, Ollie is pinging off the walls, high on sugar. She begins a fresh batch, opens another tray of eggs. Ollie and I back out of the kitchen. Ollie has a stomach ache and falls asleep on the couch. I sit beside him while she continues, talking to herself, making lists out loud. Then all of a sudden, as fast as the frenzy was seemingly whipped up, it finishes. She abandons everything, the utensils and pans, and goes to bed at 3 a.m.

  I assume she will have a long lie-in, but I’m wrong.

  On Saturday morning Ollie and I are sent out to the back garden and she locks the door behind us. If we’re going to behave like animals, we’ll be treated like them too, is her reasoning. I wouldn’t have minded being sent outside if I’d been able to go to the toilet first. I sit down on the cold concrete step, my back to the door, legs folded, trying to squeeze it up inside.

  Ollie kicks a football against the back wall, over and over again.

  ‘Can I play?’ I ask Ollie, needing some way to pass the time before I pee my pants.

  ‘No. This is your fault.’

  He thinks that because she said it, and he believes everything she says.

  What kind of eleven-year-old didn’t know how to make herself useful, she’d ranted and raved at me. She was annoyed I hadn’t cleaned up the kitchen after her. The abandoned mixing bowls in the sink, the whisks covered in globs of batter, the eggshells, the flour spattered everywhere, the batter on the floor and walls as though there’d been a violent mass pancake murder.

  I’d actually intended to clean up later in the morning. She never gets up early, especially on Saturdays, and especially after a night like she’d had last night. I didn’t think she’d surface at all. But up she popped, out of the woodwork, and caught me out. Now she’s banging around the kitchen with a load of reds spinning around her like washing machines and tumble dryers as she mutters to herself, having an argument with somebody in her head. Domestic duties always irritate her. Ironing, the little she does of it, makes her hot and irritated, red comes off her like steam. Red, red, red: the domestic devil.

  She chucks the pancakes straight in the bin, along with the elaborate business plan that she’d hatched.

  Ollie brings her hot red angry colours outside with him and so I stand back and let him work it off, hoping the breeze will take it away. Increasingly, her hate becomes his hate, her fears become his fears, her rage becomes his rage. Her sadness, his sadness. It always transfers to him, and he sucks it up greedily, consumes every last particle. Her loss today is his great loss. Last night she had sold him a dream, pulled back a secret curtain and given him a glimpse into a new life, a new world where he would be in a pancake truck by her side, at music festivals, at the seaside, sprinkling chocolate, chopping strawberries, spraying cream, and melting cheese on hot pancakes before handing them to customers, and taking their money. Playing shop is one of his favourite things and he would have been in his element. He’d lived it all out in his eight-year-old head in a rush of sugary excitement, bouncing off the walls before crashing on the couch. He’d probably dreamed about it and leapt out of bed eager and excited for it to begin. Instead, it’s gone, taken from him, chucked in the bin without another thought, because that woman from last night stole away from the house in the middle of the night when he was sleeping. I allow him his anger.

  I walk with Hugh and Ollie to the park. Ollie loves the playground, could sit on one of those spinning things for hours, going round and round with his face down watching the ground whirl by at a million miles an hour. Watching him makes me feel sick. I’m happy to be with Hugh now. Happy to be hanging with him; pink hues all round. We don’t talk about Ollie and me being locked out that morning, or about the pancake truck idea the night before. There’s no point. We rarely talk about anything that happens at home, because talking about it doesn’t solve anything. We’re just relieved to be out of it and away from it. Ollie is spinning round and round, head down, one foot doing all the groundwork, when we hear a ‘Hey.’

  I look up. A pretty, smiling girl walks over to Hugh.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, a new tone in his voice. ‘Alice this is Poh, Poh this is my sister, Alice.’