The Girl Before You. Nicola Rayner

      Our father wasn’t as drunk as Dai – he didn’t drink like that – but he’d had a couple of beers and you could tell, if you knew him well, when he was about to lose his temper: a quick tightening of the mouth, which Ruth inherited, a change in the focus of his eyes.

      Dai’s laughter came out like a breath. ‘Not a game you played at school, I imagine.’

      Our mum, with Dai’s glass in her hand, paused for a moment before filling it.

      ‘Where was that again?’ Dai said. ‘Your school?’

      Our father ignored the question. ‘I played rugby at school,’ he said shortly, looking away from Dai as the lie came out.

      He never talked about his childhood. And you could see that Dai – I never knew why they called him Dai; he sounded as English as they came – guessed, too, and that it was a test.

      When the glass she had been holding shattered on the tiles, our mother didn’t do anything to clear it up, just looked at Dai steadily: ‘I remember coming to see you play rugby.’ She glanced at our dad. ‘He wasn’t very good.’

      Later, chopping avocados in the kitchen, she said to us: ‘Public school boys. They are soft on the outside and hard on the inside.’ She held up the stone of an avocado. ‘Be careful of them, girls. They seem so polite, so courteous …’ She paused, looking for the words. ‘I don’t know what those schools do to them.’ She didn’t usually speak to us like that. As if we were already grown up. ‘And the worst thing is,’ she added, looking sadder than I’d ever seen her, ‘he wants to be one of them.’