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  It was also strange that everyone made such a fuss if I drew a few dinosaurs, whereas Angie found it funny when Matty made Scaly and Spiky-Thumb attack each other savagely. I knew why, of course. I was the girl who’d gone a bit weird ever since her mum had left her.

  Matty was a bouncy girl with a lovely family so nobody thought she was weird, no matter what she did. I was a droopy girl with only half a family so Dad and Aunty Sue and Miss Hope were worried that I was disturbed when I was just playing normally. It wasn’t fair.

  It also wasn’t fair that Matty was going to be a bridesmaid on Saturday, wearing the most beautiful dress in the world – and I wasn’t.

  ‘Matty’s soooo lucky,’ I said to Dad as he was driving me home.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ said Dad.

  ‘I wish I was going to be a bridesmaid.’

  ‘I know, love.’

  ‘I’ve never ever been to a wedding.’

  ‘Come to think of it, neither have I,’ said Dad.

  I didn’t say anything else until we got home. It wasn’t bedtime yet. Dad suggested we might watch a DVD together, but there wasn’t anything I fancied. Dad brought out the battered cardboard box of Ludo that he’d had when he was a boy. We played one game, but it wasn’t really exciting when it was just the two of us. So then we just sat on the sofa together, staring into space.

  ‘Dad?’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Dad, why didn’t you and Mum get married?’

  ‘Well . . . not all mums and dads marry, you know.’

  ‘Yes, but didn’t Mum want a lovely wedding?’ I couldn’t help thinking that if Mum and Dad had been properly married, she mightn’t have gone away. If they’d been married, it would have taken a while before they could get divorced. Mum would still belong to us until then.

  ‘Mum didn’t fancy a wedding at all,’ said Dad. ‘She laughed at the idea. She said she couldn’t stand the idea of prancing about in a white dress. She was always so funny and lively and unconventional. She always wanted to do things differently. You know what she was like, Tilly.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said uncertainly.

  ‘You do remember her, don’t you?’ asked Dad, looking startled.

  ‘Yes, of course I do. But I don’t know how to think about her. Sometimes I just love her and want her so much. And sometimes I hate her for going away and not coming back,’ I said in a very small voice.

  ‘I feel exactly the same way,’ said Dad, and he reached out and pulled me close for a cuddle. ‘Tell you what,’ he added, talking into my hair. ‘We’ll have a very special day out on Saturday. Where would you like to go?’

  ‘Not the zoo,’ I said.

  ‘Not the zoo,’ said Dad. ‘Perhaps we could go shopping at the Flowerfields Centre?’

  I knew Dad hated going shopping, especially at the Flowerfields Centre. I rather wanted to go, but I shook my head.

  ‘Then how about an amusement park?’ Dad suggested. ‘You know, one with those roller-coaster rides.’

  I thought about it. I knew Matty would be wildly envious if I told her I’d been to one. She was forever begging her mum and dad to take her, but they wouldn’t because they thought Lewis was too little.

  I’d never admit it to Matty in a million years but I felt I was maybe too little too. I hated the thought of being up so high and then swooping down, screaming my head off. I imagined my head literally unscrewing and spinning through the air like a ball.

  ‘I think I might feel a bit sick on a roller-coaster ride,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s a relief. I didn’t really fancy it either,’ said Dad. ‘We’ll cross an amusement park off our list. So, how about a park park? A big ornamental park with a lake and statues and little bridges?’

  It sounded a bit boring, but I said yes. And it was actually quite interesting. There was an amazing crystal grotto like a very big dark cave with thousands of crystals glittering all around us. I held Dad’s hand and imagined little goblins scuttling about our feet. I tried to get Dad to join in making up a little tribe of goblins, but he wasn’t very good at it. He just started listing Dopey and Sneezy and all those other dwarfs in Snow White.

  Then we climbed up to a Turkish tent at the top of a little hill and sat in it surveying the grounds below. Dad told me that servants used to come with refreshments for eighteenth-century people visiting the garden.

  ‘What sort of refreshments?’ I asked, wishing they still came now.

  ‘Well, it’s a Turkish tent, so perhaps they served Turkish coffee and Turkish delight,’ said Dad, trying hard, because he knew he’d failed at the goblin game.

  ‘Right, you pour the coffee and I’ll open the box of Turkish delight,’ I said, pretending.

  ‘Oh look, I just happen to have some Turkish delight in my pocket,’ said Dad.

  It wasn’t actual Turkish delight, it was a handful of Quality Street in shiny paper, which was actually even better. Dad let me have the caramel and nut wrapped in purple. He had a thin yellow toffee stick. Then I twisted the coloured wrappers round my finger and turned them into tiny glasses, and we toasted each other and drank pretend wine.

  The best place of all in the park was a little castle up another hill. It looked just like a picture in a fairy-tale book.

  ‘Can we go inside?’ I begged.

  ‘I think it’s just a folly, a pretend castle,’ said Dad, but he was wrong.

  There was a door, and you could go up a winding staircase right to the top and peer out of the turrets. All the rooms were disappointingly empty.

  ‘Well, they’re just waiting for us to move in and furnish it,’ said Dad. Then he saw the excitement on my face. ‘I’m pretending!’ he added quickly.

  It was still fun deciding on beautiful crimson carpets as soft as fur so we could pad about barefoot, and huge velvet sofas and Chinese cabinets for all our things, and two four-poster beds, a big one for Dad and a little one for me. It was strange how we could furnish the castle so splendidly when we didn’t have a clue how to make our new house a comfortable home.

  We stayed in the castle a long time, pretending we were the king and the princess of all the land, the meadows, the woods, all the way to the hazy blue hills on the horizon.

  ‘Happy?’ said Dad.

  ‘Yes, happy-happy-happy,’ I said.

  We came down from the castle and walked all the way back through the park, our feet aching now. We spotted a walled kitchen garden near the entrance.

  ‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what we’re growing, and then I’ll decide what to cook for us for our supper, O King.’

  ‘Promise it’s not turnips, Princess,’ said Dad, playing along with me.

  But we were distracted from our vegetable survey by music and laughter coming from behind the wall. We went to have a look. There was a long white marquee all lit up with sparkling lights, with people in lovely clothes gathered inside.

  ‘It’s a party just for us!’ I said. And then I realized. I saw a lady in a long white frock and a man in a black suit cutting a huge tiered cake. It wasn’t a party. It was a wedding.

  It wasn’t Matty’s Aunt Rachel’s wedding. These bridesmaids wore primrose yellow. They’d have looked much prettier in raspberry pink. One of them looked round and stared at us.

  ‘Come on, we can’t gatecrash a wedding,’ said Dad.

  We went back to the car park and drove home. We didn’t pretend. We weren’t in the mood any more.

  Chapter Five

  THERE WERE LOTS of official photographs taken at Matty’s Aunt Rachel’s wedding but I didn’t get to see them until later. I just saw the photos on Matty’s mobile phone. She smuggled it into school and showed me in the girls’ toilets at break time. They were mostly selfies: Matty and her aunt, in her white bridal gown holding her bouquet of deep pink roses; Matty and her two cousins, all in raspberry pink; Matty and Lewis and a boy cousin, all of them sticking out their tongues; Matty still sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes too; Matty licking her