Guilty by Joy Hindle Page A

tissue each time I picked something up, and then it would be carefully discarded in the meticulously placed white bin liner hanging from the door handle.
    ‘Josh,’ much calmer now, more a call of despair than anger. She passed Sadie’s room. Mum and Aunt Caroline had hit upon the idea that Sadie should move in with us for a bit to try and ‘help’ them all. She even attended my school for a few months now. ‘Where’s Josh?’ anxiety now rising in her voice.
    Smirking at the thought of me, her freak of a cousin, Sadie mocked, ‘Probably off with his mates!’
    Mum stopped in her tracks and her anger took fresh breath, this time directed at her niece. ‘Why do you always have to be so mean?’
    In mock astonishment, Sadie raised both hands in the air. ‘What are you on about, Auntie? What did I say wrong this time?’
    Mum couldn’t even be bothered to reply because it was an argument she would lose. In an ordinary world, Sadie was right – her comment would be completely acceptable, but in this deluded world I did not do friends or socialising, I did ‘I’m a hermit’.
    Sadie smiled to herself as Mum retreated. She was so relieved to be spared yet another Josh debate. ‘Why’s he like this?’ Mum would ask, time and time again.
    Sadie liked to claim normality. She liked to portray to others that her world was normal; her few friends were normal and so far she had done a jolly good job in disguising me, her abnormal cousin, from them. She’d managed to control their visits to our home when she knew I would be out with Mum at one of my many medical appointments. She avoided me like the plague at school and in fact most of her so-called friends didn’t really know who I was. Sadie ignored me all around the house. She never interacted with the weirdo. The second I entered the room, Sadie left, and during the meals when Mum insisted we ate together as a family, Sadie lowered her eyes and never looked at me. Whenever she could get away with it she wore her earphones. Mum had only just begun to notice Sadie’s total rejection of me and it was on her agenda to right things.
    ‘We’ll have to plan some family days out,’ she nagged Dad. ‘Can’t you take them both to a football match soon?’
    ‘Sadie acts too old for her age. She likes to think she’s older than Josh,’ Dad moaned back. ‘She’s not into family days out any more. Anyway she’s into rugby and Josh doesn’t give a damn about sport.’
    Mum felt the anxiety rising in her chest as she continued her search for me. The hand wash wasn’t top of her agenda any more; the anger had subsided, replaced by worry. I had been quite depressed recently. I’d been prescribed Prozac to subdue my nervous system. I’d only been eating biscuits and nothing else. My therapist had managed to get me to confide that eating anything else would mean a member of my family would die. How could an intelligent young man not see these were irrational thoughts?
    ‘Josh,’ she upped her pace as she pushed open doors, quickly glancing into each room. Dad’s bulk was hunched over his computer. His bald crown didn’t rise as she demanded if he’d seen me. He was much more dismissive of my peculiarities.
    ‘He’ll grow out of them,’ he’d insist. ‘It’s you, you fuss over Josh much too much.’ That was the answer to every problem in Dad’s life – Mum was always to blame.
    ‘Josh is missing,’ she insisted. ‘Mark, are you listening to me? He’s gone. His room is empty.’
    Slowly he swivelled round. He glared at her, his ruddy complexion exaggerating the cross expression revealed in his green eyes.
    ‘You always overdramatize, Della. He’s probably popped out to the newsagent or something. He’s sixteen, that’s what sixteen-year-olds do – they pop out without checking with Mummy all the time.’
    Sensing her chance to gang upon her aunt, yet again, Sadie sidled out of his room.
    ‘Yeah, Uncle Mark’s right. Like I said, probably round at a