The ‘baby’ apparently needed a thousand extra calories a day and while we all sat picking over mushroom biryanis and carrot soups, my mother gorged on spaghetti and chocolate mousse. Have I mentioned how thin we all were by this point? Not that any of us had been particularly overweight to begin with, apart from my father. But we were virtually emaciated by the time my mother was being fattened up like a ceremonial goat. I was still wearing clothes that had fitted me when I was eleven, and I was nearly fifteen. Clemency and my sister looked as though they had eating disorders and Birdie was basically a twig. I’ll tell you for nothing that vegan food goes straight through you; nothing sticks to the sides. But when that food is offered in mean portions and you are constantly told not to be greedy by asking for seconds, when one cook hates butter, so there is never enough fat （and children must eat fat）， another hates salt, so there is never enough flavour, and another refuses to eat wheat because it causes their stomach to swell like a whoopee cushion, so there is never enough starch or stodge, well, that makes for very thin, malnourished people.
One of our neighbours, shortly after the bodies were found and the press were buzzing around our house with microphones and handheld cameras, appeared on the news one night talking about how thin we had all looked. ‘I did wonder’， said the neighbour （whom I had never before seen in my life）， ‘if they were being looked after properly. I did worry a bit. They were all so terribly thin. But you don’t like to interfere, do you?’
No, mysterious neighbour lady, no, you clearly do not.
But while we wasted away my mother grew and grew. Birdie made her maternity tunics out of black cotton, bales of which she’d bought cheap from a fabric sale months earlier, in order to make shoulder bags to sell at Camden Market. She had sold a grand total of two before being chased away by other stallholders who all had licences to sell, and had instantly given up on the project. But now she was sewing with a fervour, desperate to be a part of what was happening to my mother. David and Birdie soon took to wearing Birdie’s black tunics too. They gave all their other clothes to charity. They looked utterly ridiculous.
I should have guessed that it wouldn’t be long before we children were expected to dress like this too.
Birdie came into my room one day with bin bags. ‘We’re to give all our clothes to charity,’ she said. ‘We don’t need them as much as other people. I’ve come to help you pack them away.’
In retrospect I can’t believe how easily I capitulated. I never gave myself over to David’s ethos, but I was scared of him. I’d seen him fell Phin on the pavement outside our house that awful night the year before. I’d seen him hit him. I knew he was capable of more and of worse. And I was equally scared of Birdie. She was the one who had unleashed the monster inside him. So while I often moaned or grumbled, I never refused. And thus I found myself at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in late April emptying my drawers and cupboards into bin bags; there went my favourite jeans, there went the really nice hoodie from H&M that Phin had passed down to me when I’d admired it. There went my T-shirts, my jumpers and shorts.
‘But what will I wear when I go out?’ I asked. ‘I can’t go out in the nude.’
‘Here,’ she said, passing me a black tunic and a pair of black leggings. ‘We’re all to wear these from now on. It makes sense.’
‘I can’t go out in this,’ I said, appalled.
‘We’re keeping our overcoats,’ she replied. ‘Not that you ever go out anyway.’
It was true. I was something of a recluse. What with all the ‘household rules’， the ‘not going to school’ and the fact that I had nowhere to go, I barely left the house. I took the black robe and the leggings from her and held them to my chest. She stared at me meaningfully. ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘The rest.’
I looked down. She was referring to the clothes I was already wearing.
I sighed. ‘Could I have a moment of privacy please?’