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When my little sister was a month old, our mother died. I was just thirteen. My father and I were suddenly adrift with a small, alien creature under our protection. In the months leading to my sister's birth I had grown difficult. Grief forced my father and I further apart. We mourned my mother alone. We were, after all, mourning different things.

At first, however, we learnt to look after Sabine together, but at some point or other, I fell into full responsibility over my little sister. I didn't exactly have much else to do. At least, I had none of the responsibilities of my father.

I became Sabine's mother and friend as well as her caring elder brother. I was her playmate. I cooked for her. I changed her sheets when she wet the bed. My father doted on her when he was around, and she adored him, but it was my room she ran to when she had a nightmare. It was I to whom she whispered frightened tales of bleeding woman, and giant silver birds ripping in two in the sky above.

Despite my relationship with Sabine, I was a withdrawn teenager and developed into a withdrawn young man. As Sabine grew up, it became clear that we were nothing alike. She was sunshine. She was joy. She made everyone smile and laugh. She was gentle and bright and trusting and never did an untrue word pass her lips.

While I buried myself in books – philosophy, the great classics, history, psychology – Sabine was exploring the world and the people around her. I filled my head with general knowledge, hungry for information from the outside world, and she was content in the here and now, in what the island and her own existence gave her. She could sing and dance, and Amelia taught her to make wicker baskets. She taught herself to paint.

If it had not been for Sabine, I don't know what would have happened to me, for without her I would have been alone. My relationship Even before my mother was pregnant with Sabine, he never looked at me straight in the eye. I think he was jealous of my mother's affection for me. I competed with him quite obviously for attention. I was a clingy child. I had a pang of irritation every time my mother was affectionate with him. When they touched I had to run over and make it a family hug. How very Oedipal.

I've made myself sound rather bad. Let me readdress the balance. I was always pale, small, a bookworm. The other, few, children on the island were constantly running about and getting into scraps. I preferred to sit with a book. My father disliked this, and tried to discourage it, but to no avail. By the age of eight I had developed the need for glasses because of reading in poor light, secretly, late at night. My father's resentment of how I behaved grew. He had never been an academic man.

It was this that led me to cling to my mother. She had nothing but motherly feelings for me. She did not judge my passions. She listened patiently to my latest discovery. I might tell her about Oliver Twist's adventures, or some ghastly facts about hot air balloons, or how the Romans had built a wall clear across Scotland, from one sea to another (and how Scotland was far bigger than our Island).

When my mother died the competition stopped, and there was mere silence between us. We were strangers who moved around each other from day to day with only Sabine in common. To me he was nothing but the man who had given my name; Benjamin Linus.