Blood Tracks by Paula Rawsthorne

today? It’s Dad’s birthday. I just want to be at home.”
    Her mum nodded. “Okay. I’ll ask Danny if he wants to stay at home as well. Maybe we could do something nice together; go to the water park or bowling, like we used to do with Dad.”
    “As long as Tom doesn’t come,” she said. “He’s been calling round every day since he got back. I don’t want him here.”
    “All right, I’ll ask him not to come over today but please be nice to your Uncle Tom. He’s been a real support to us.”
    “He knows things,” Gina whispered.
    Her mum looked at her anxiously. “Listen, Gina, Dr. Havers has been phoning. She’s really looking forward to seeing you again. She said that she’d fit you in anytime. Isn’t that good of her? I’m convinced that you’ll start feeling better once you get talking to her. So what do you say? Can I make you another appointment for tomorrow?”
    “No! Leave me alone,” Gina said, putting the duvet over her head.
    She heard her mum sigh and walk out of the room.
    Gina turned on the bedside light and looked over at the wall of photographs. “Mum thinks I’m mad, you know, Dad,” she whispered. “Your wife, my mum, doesn’t believe me ! What’s she planning next? Is she going to have me sectioned and locked up?” Gina looked at her alarm clock. It was three twenty a.m. “By the way, Dad – happy birthday,” she said sweetly.
    Their plans to go out for the day came to nothing. Gina and Danny decided that they didn’t want to go anywhere; instead they spent the morning in bouts of silence as if they were inside a church. Gina wandered into the living room and saw Danny lifting the hood of his fish tank. She cupped her hands around the urn and watched her brother sprinkling the flakes of fish food onto the water.
    “The tank’s looking great. You’ve done really well with it, Danny,” Gina said, crouching down to see the rush of fish swimming to the surface, their big mouths open, ready to devour the food.
    “Yeah, can you believe that they’re all still alive?” he said proudly.
    “No,” she smiled.
    “And Gina’s doing well,” he said mischievously, pointing to the ugly suckerfish scavenging along the bottom of the tank.
    “Yeah, Danny’s looking great too,” she replied, indicating the spiky ball of pufferfish that looked on the verge of popping.
    Her skinny brother gave a short-lived laugh before his face clouded over. “Dad would have loved this, wouldn’t he?”
    “Oh yeah. He would have loved it.” She nodded vigorously, biting her lip.
    Danny stared into the tank. “If you look at it long enough, it sends you into a trance. It like…hypnotizes you, and all the stuff going on in your brain just stops and you’re somewhere else…but nowhere, if you get what I mean…just kind of peaceful and nice.”
    Gina wished she could find peace by looking at the tank, but she knew what Danny was talking about. There was something about the combination of elements in it that cast a spell over the observer. The soft light in the hood spread a warm glow over the exotic, watery kingdom; the shimmering fish, their colours a feast for the eyes, gliding elegantly through the swaying plants. The bright, razor-sharp corals sitting on the bed of muted blue stones conjured up images of a tropical reef and the soothing hum of the pump made eyes glaze over.
    Danny kept his eyes fixed on the tank as he said quietly, “Sometimes I think it’s my fault that Dad killed himself.”
    “What? Why would you say that, Danny?”
    “I’m not stupid or anything; I know Dad didn’t do it because of this, but I think that I probably made him even sadder when really he needed someone to cheer him up. On the day before he died he asked me to go to the allotment with him, to do some digging, but I was on the Xbox in the middle of a game, so I said I wouldn’t and I let him go on his own. If I’d just gone with him and helped him I might have made him happy and maybe it would