and Rajpal’s, growing louder as they came up the stairs. Rajpal’s laughter reached a crescendo right outside her door.
‘It’s late,’ she heard her mother call from her bedroom. ‘Vikram, he should be in bed.’
Vikram’s voice came through Sukhvinder’s door, close by, loud and warm.
‘Are you asleep already, Jolly?’
It was her childhood nickname, bestowed in irony. Jaswant had been Jazzy, and Sukhvinder, a grizzling, unhappy baby, rarely smiling, had become Jolly.
‘No,’ Sukhvinder called back. ‘I’ve only just gone to bed.’
‘Well, it might interest you to know that your brother, here—’
But what Rajpal had done was lost in his shouting protests, his laughter; she heard Vikram moving away, still teasing Rajpal.
Sukhvinder waited for the house to fall silent. She clung to the prospect of her only consolation, as she would have hugged a life-belt, waiting, waiting, for them all to go to bed…
(And as she waited, she remembered that evening not long ago, at the end of rowing training, when they had been walking through the darkness towards the car park by the canal. You were so tired after rowing. Your arms and your stomach muscles ached, but it was a good clean pain. She always slept properly after rowing. And then Krystal, bringing up the rear of the group with Sukhvinder, had called her a silly Paki bitch.
It had come out of nowhere. They had all been messing around with Mr Fairbrother. Krystal thought she was being funny. She used ‘fucking’ interchangeably with ‘very’, and seemed to see no difference between them. Now she said ‘Paki’ as she would have said ‘dozy’ or ‘dim’. Sukhvinder was conscious of her face falling, and experienced the familiar sliding, scalding sensation in her stomach.
‘What did you say?’
Mr Fairbrother had wheeled around to face Krystal. None of them had ever heard him properly angry before.
‘I di’n mean nuthin’,’ said Krystal, half taken aback, half defiant. ‘I was on’y jokin’. She knows I was jus’ jokin’. Don’ yeh?’ she demanded of Sukhvinder, who muttered cravenly that she knew it was a joke.
‘I never want to hear you use that word again.’
They all knew how much he liked Krystal. They all knew he had paid for her to go on a couple of their trips out of his own pocket. Nobody laughed louder than Mr Fairbrother at Krystal’s jokes; she could be very funny.
They walked on, and everybody was embarrassed. Sukhvinder was afraid to look at Krystal; she felt guilty, as she always did.
They were approaching the people-carrier when Krystal said, so quietly that even Mr Fairbrother did not hear it: ‘I wuz jokin’.’
And Sukhvinder said quickly, ‘I know.’
‘Yeah, well. S’ry.’
It came out as a mangled monosyllable, and Sukhvinder thought it tactful not to acknowledge it. Nevertheless, it cleaned her out. It restored her dignity. On the way back to Pagford, she initiated, for the first time ever, the singing of the team’s lucky song, asking Krystal to start with Jay-Z’s rap.)
Slowly, very slowly, her family seemed to be putting themselves to bed at last. Jaswant spent a long time in the bathroom, clinking and crashing around. Sukhvinder waited until Jaz had finished primping herself, until her parents had stopped talking in their room, for the house to fall silent.
Then, at last, it was safe. She sat up and pulled the razor blade out from a hole in the ear of her old cuddly rabbit. She had stolen the blade from Vikram’s store in the bathroom cabinet. She got off the bed and groped for the torch on her shelf, and a handful of tissues, then moved into the furthest part of her room, into the little round turret in the corner. Here, she knew, the torch’s light would be confined, and would not show around the edges of the door. She sat down with her back against the wall, pushed up the sleeve of her nightshirt and examined by torchlight the marks left by her last session, still visible, criss-crossed and dark on her arm, but healing. With a slight shiver of fear that was a blessed relief in its narrow, immediate focus, she placed the blade halfway up her forearm and sliced into her own flesh.
Sharp, hot pain and the blood came at once; when she had cut herself right up to her elbow she pressed the wad of tissues onto the long wound, making sure nothing leaked onto her nightshirt or the carpet. After a minute or two, she cut again, horizontally, across the first incision, making a ladder, pausing to press and to