Forbidden

She pretends to consider this for a moment. ‘Ah, well, that’s a tough one.’

I start uncapping the bottle. ‘Come on. Let’s get this over and done with.’

Cuffing my wrist gently with her fingers, she draws my hand towards her, inspecting the raw, bloody knuckles, the skin grated back from the wound: a jagged white rectangle surrounding the wet, crimson lacerations. She winces. ‘Christ, Lochan. You did this falling against a wall? It looks like you took a grater to the back of your hand!’

She gently dabs at my savaged knuckles. I take a deep breath and watch her face: her eyes are narrowed in concentration, her touch very gentle. I swallow painfully.

After bandaging it with gauze and putting everything away, she returns to the side of the bath and kisses me again, and as I pull back, rubs my arm with an uncertain smile.

‘Is it really hurting?’

‘No, of course not!’ I exclaim truthfully. ‘I don’t know why you girls get into such a panic at the merest drop of blood. Anyway, thank you, Miss Nightingale.’ I give her a quick kiss on the head, stand up and reach for the door.

‘Hey!’ She reaches out a hand to stop me, a sparkle of mischief in her eyes. ‘Don’t you think I deserve a bit more than that for my efforts?’

I pull a face and motion awkwardly towards the door. ‘Willa . . .’

‘She’ll be spaced out in front of the TV now!’

I take a reluctant step forward. ‘OK . . .’

But she stops me before I have time to reach her, hand on my chest, gently holding me at arm’s length. Her expression is quizzical. ‘What’s up with you today?’

I shake my head with a wry smile. ‘I du

She gives me a long look, rubbing the tip of her tongue against her upper lip. ‘Loch, is everything OK?’

‘Of course!’ I smile brightly. ‘Now, shall we get out of here? This is not exactly the most romantic place!’

I can feel her bewilderment as strongly as if it were my own. Throughout di

But at night I can’t sleep, my mind plagued with fears. With constant coursework and the day-to-day hassle of living to contend with, added to the fact that we can never, ever show any display of affection in public or even within our own family, the familiar suffocating shackles are tightening still further. Will we ever be free to exist like a normal couple? I wonder. To live together, hold hands in public, kiss on a street corner? Or will we be for ever condemned to lead closet lives, hidden away behind locked doors and drawn curtains? Or worse still, once our siblings are old enough, will we have no choice but to run away and leave them behind?

I keep telling myself to take one day at a time, but how is this really possible? I am about to leave school, start university, and therefore, by default, am forced to contemplate my future. What I’d really like to do is write – for a newspaper or magazine perhaps – but I know that is nothing more than a ridiculous flight of fancy. What matters is money: it’s imperative I aim for a job with a decent starting salary and good earning potential.

For I have little faith that once I’m earning, our mother will continue to support us. By the time I leave uni, Willa will be eight, still requiring a whole decade of financial and practical support. Tiffin will need another seven, Kit another two . . . The years and numbers and calculations blow my mind. I know that Maya will insist on helping too, but I don’t want to have to depend on her, never want her to feel trapped. If she wanted to go on to further study, if she suddenly fancied picking up her childhood dream of being an actress, I could never let the family stand in her way. I could never deny her that right – the right of any human being to choose the life they want to lead.

For my part, the choice has already been made. Having the children taken into care is something I have been trying to guard against since the age of twelve. No sacrifice is too great to keep my family together, yet the long path ahead looks so rocky and steep that I regularly wake up at night fearing I will fall. Only the thought of Maya at my side makes the ascent seem possible at all. But lately the sacrifices just seem to be getting bigger.

Our mother has been desperate to marry Dave from the moment she set eyes on him, yet Dave, even with his divorce now finalized, has not proposed, clearly not prepared to take on the extra baggage of another large family. Our mother has already made her choice – but now I’m about to turn eighteen and legally become an adult I fear she may cut us off completely in a final bid to get that ring on her finger. Every time I force her to part with some money for the basics – food, bills, new clothes, school things – she starts yelling about how she left school and started work at sixteen, moved out and asked her parents for nothing. Reminding her that she didn’t have three younger siblings to care for is her cue to go on about how she never wanted children in the first place, how she only had us to please our father, how he’d wanted another and another until, tiring of us all, he’d run off to start anew with someone else. I point out that our father’s desertion does not somehow magically give her the right to desert us too. But this only provokes her further, prompting the cheap-shot reminder that she would never have married our father had she not accidentally got pregnant with me. I know she says this out of drunken fury, but I also know it’s true: this is why she has continued resenting me, far more than the others, all my life. This then leads to the usual tirade about how she works fourteen-hour days just to keep a roof over our heads, that all she asks of me is that I look after my siblings for a few hours after school each day. If I try reminding her that although this was the initial set-up when our father left, the reality now is very different, she starts screaming about her right to a life too. Finally I find myself reduced to blackmail: only the threat of us all turning up at Dave’s, suitcases in hand, will force her to part with the cash. In many ways I am thankful she has finally gone from our lives, even if it means that thoughts about the future, our future, weigh heavily upon me.

Sleep evades me once more, so in the early hours of the morning I go down to the kitchen to tackle the pile of letters addressed to Mum that have been accumulating on the sideboard for weeks now. By the time I finish opening them all, the kitchen table is completely covered with bills, credit card statements, payment demands . . . Maya touches the back of my neck, making me jump.

‘Didn’t mean to startle you.’ She takes the chair beside me, resting her bare feet on the edge of mine, circling her knees with her arms. In her nightdress, her hair hanging loose and smooth, the colour of autumn leaves, she looks up at me with eyes as wide and i

‘You look just like Tiffin when he’s lost a match and is trying to put on a brave face,’ she comments, laughter in her eyes.

I manage a small laugh. Sometimes, being unable to hide my emotions from her is frustrating.

The laughter leaves an unsettling silence.

Maya tugs gently at my hand. ‘Tell me.’

I take a sharp, shallow breath and shake my head at the floor. ‘Just, you know, the future and stuff.’