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I ask her when she is calm. The answer is always the same: they are jealous of me. ‘You’re a very special little girl,’ she explains. ‘Quite different to the others. ’ The more she tells me this, the more I embody her words, and the more unremarkable my siblings appear to me. Although they are bigger and taller, I cannot look up to them. They don’t excel in any area of study at school, not even sport. Neither do they appear to be unique in any way at all, except for the simple fact one is a girl.

You’ve also spotted the scene in a hundred atmospheric summer photographs: skinny showoff boys caught mid-air, spread-eagled between jetty and water. Even at my age I envied them. Already my shirt was sticking to me from all that trudging after the missed balls. The buffalo runners had an annoying way of gripping the ball and stopping it from rolling back down to me. ‘Don’t be a bad sport,’ I told him. I was feeling disheartened as well as hot. Anthony was ruining the party mood. ’ Brian looked for direction to the women with the spritzers and balloons.

And I can tell from her tone he’s got her flustered. ‘Well it’s not good enough,’ he says. I’m indignant at the gruffness of his response and I inform him in a loud voice from my corner of the bench that he doesn’t have any control over me. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t respond, just gives me a dark, resentful glare. I watch as his face gradually becomes monochromatic, the only hint of colour about him the sallow shade of windbreaker he wears for his long walks on the grey beach below our house, a long stick for a companion, seagulls crying in his wake.

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