"What's that?" Howard asked.

"Jam," Cathy lied. She linked her fingers together and held them behind her back, staring up into her brother's brown mousy eyes. Heathcliff stood behind her, his head bowed, reeking of a quiet darkness. He hadn't shut the door behind him. In the background the moor was roaring with the wind in its long, sticky grass.

"Jam, is it?" Howard smirked. "And where exactly," he reached forward slowly and trailed his index finger, pressing hard enough to make her pucker her face, just under her lower lip, "did you get jam out there?" He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise as he inspected the red substance, eerily cold on her skin. "My, my, Cath. It don't look a lot like jam to me."

"Well it is jam," she spat at him. "You don't even like jam, you wouldn't know."

"I know what jam looks like."

"Just leave me alone, Howie!" She went to run past him, but he was too quick and far too big. He lunged out for her, caught her whole shoulder in the palm of his hand, and pushed her back into her original position, smiling with all of his small teeth.

"No," he said, elongating the vowel snidely. "It's alright, Cathy. You needn't be scared – you can admit it."

"I didn't steal nothing!" Cathy barked.

"No, you can admit that he hit you. Obviously he's done something to hurt ya, Cath – it's alright –"

"Well you know sod all!" she squawked, "He hasn't hit me or done anything! So leave me alone!"

Howard chuckled. "Cathy, stay put."

"Oh, my bum, Howard!" she snapped, and then kicked him as hard as she could. Howard made a painful noise by sucking in a breath through his teeth, and Cathy took the opportunity to run for the staircase, with Heathcliff closely following her. Her little patent red buckle-up shoes beat the wood with a wonderful thick sound. Her legs were strong and handsomely curved. He noticed that she was wearing white cotton knickers as her dress bounced on her waist, and one thick periwinkle-blue vein wove up under the hem and broke off at the end like the tongue of a cobra. Heathcliff looked away quickly. In the hallway Cathy walked hurriedly to her room, the second door on the left, and swooshed the door open, exhaling hard.

"Oh, God, I'm glad we made it," she giggled, "I do like running away, especially when I feel like I might get caught."

Heathcliff gave her a coy smile, "Yeah."

"Well, we need to clean ourselves up or Howie will tell everyone you've hit me," she said, clapping her hands together and frowning. "So, I'll go into the bathroom and wash my face and things, and you go and find some new clothes and then we'll swap."

"O.K.."

She walked out of her room and left him. He found out some of Howard's old clothes in the tall wardrobe. Each item was particularly embarrassing in its own way, perhaps they were presents from aunts or grandparents; he picked out a scratchy grey woollen jumper and heaved it over his head, popping the buttons of his shirt quickly, wincing at its tightness over his shoulders. The jeans weren't too bad, but they clung to his thighs in an awkwardly feminine sort of fashion. He squeezed his eyes shut, briefly enjoying the swollen darkness and ululating colours there. Hopefully Cathy was too busy running around or chewing her hair to notice him.

She came whirling back with her face palely clean and soap-foam still sliding down on the right side of her face. She was rubbing her eyes.

"Soap in the eye!" she sighed. "You can go and wash now if you want."

He went into the bathroom and sloshed a few handfuls of water over his face and across his neck, drying his skin with the luxuriously rough side of the towel. When he returned, Cathy was sat on the bed, swinging her legs, dressed in a red cotton button-down blouse and camel-coloured trousers, soft and expensive-looking.

He thought of her father's clothes when he had met him in Liverpool, how they had felt on his face as he slung his beefy arm across his shoulders and led him to a cafe. He'd been bought a meat pie and chips with mint mushy peas. They sat at a plastic red and white chequered table on flimsy chairs and said he had been asked a few questions, with a crinkly smile, like Where is your Mother? What is your name? How old are you? Whose money is that? He knew the answers to only two of those questions, and he wasn't very willing to answer despite the bloke's unnatural kindness. Why did you buy me dinner? He had asked. You looked starved, lad, he answered, of food and water, love. It's the Christian thing to do. He swallowed down a gravy-covered clot of beef and offered him a guilty sort of half smile.

"That's better, they'll never know," Cathy sniggered. He nodded. "Why don't you sit down, Heathcliff?"

"Are you actually going to call me that?" he asked, "You've really named me?"

"Well yeah, you're my Dad's now."

"Like a car or a dog?" he scoffed.

"Like a baby," Cathy answered cheerily. He paused to think about this, watching her carefully as she beamed up into him and began patting the white duvet invitingly. "And I think Heathcliff is a really nice name."

"I'm nothing like you," he said quietly, leaning back against the wall.

"I'm my Dad's baby," she shrugged, "so are you."

"But I'm different coloured. Everyone will know –"

"You're nice coloured. Like Cadbury hot chocolate! It doesn't matter. Dad wants you here, that's what's important."

"Well, you don't want me here."

"Yeah, I don't know what I think of you, you're ever so funny," she agreed, pressing her lips together, "you talk funny don't you?"

"I'm not from around here."

"Where are you from then?"

"Where do you think I'm from?" he smirked. "It's a good an idea as mine."

"Ooh, now that's a fun game. Where Did Heathcliff Come From?" she giggled, and dropped back into the bed, gazing at the ceiling. "Maybe you're from a family of Arabian snake charmers or a travelling circus."

"Maybe I am."

"Maybe you're a secret lion tamer!" Cathy had the strange feeling that Heathcliff would find a lion much better company than herself at the moment. She huffed in frustration and slapped the bed beside her. "Oh just sit down!"

He watched her cautiously, with graceful little turns of his head like a like a curious cat.

"I won't be mean, I promise," Cathy reasoned with him. "Don't you want to be friends?"

"I've never been bothered about friends," he shrugged. Cathy shook her head.

"I'm a very good friend. I'll steal you extra coconut cake at dinner. I used to do it for the birds!"

"What birds?"

"Well, those birds," Cathy pointed to the window. Heathcliff saw through the misty glass a circular shape of odd black stars in the sky, swirling and diving. He frowned.

"They eat cake?"

"They eat bread and cake and all sorts of things," Cathy said incredulously. "What, you don't know what birds eat?"

He gave her a quick smile, dangerous as jagged glass, "I don't know what people eat, hardly."

Cathy jolted upright and stared at him wildly. "How can you not know?"

"Well, I'd see something," he explained, his voice trembling slightly in shame, "and if it looked like food I'd just eat it."

"On the floor?"

"Usually. Or in a bin. Anywhere really."

"Didn't you get ill?"

"Yeah."

"What, just 'yeah'?"

"Yeah, just yeah."

Cathy grunted at him. "You're so nasty."

"I'm not."

"Well, sit down with me then!" she exclaimed, "At least sit down with me."

Heathcliff did as he was told silently, sitting on the foot of the bed and hanging his head. She scooted to sit beside him. He hadn't washed his neck properly – an oily black tinge was glistening on the back of his neck in the sunlight and he smelt like earth and wet moss and wild animal shit.

"You didn't wash properly," Cathy rolled her eyes. "Do you know how to do anything?"

He scowled at her. His eyes were so dark they were reflective, so dark there was no inside, black like beetles. She swore as they moved across her face they made a scuttling sound. They paused on her mouth.

"Shut up," he muttered.

"But you smell horrible, Heathcliff," she mumbled, "Why don't you just run a bath?"

"I've never run a bath."

"Well then I can teach –"

"I don't need you to teach me anything." He stood up, and pushed her shoulder flimsily, causing her to rock back into the bed, "I definitely don't you want to be your friend."

He started walking away.

"Heathcliff!"

He carried on walking, out of the room. Cathy lay back on the bed and sighed angrily. In the hallway she could quite clearly hear Howard shouting at him, shouting something, and then Heathcliff said, "I don't know what you mean," in his funny voice and everything went silent.

The house was quiet for the rest of the day. Mum wasn't feeling too well, and so the bowl of currant cake mix sat on the countertop in the kitchen, forlorn. Cathy watched it hungrily. Dad had served them up ham sandwiches and salad for dinner, but it was the thicker ham that tasted fresh of pigs and had lanes of fat curling all over it, squelching and sparkling between the bread. She didn't like it. Howard refused to eat in front of Heathcliff in case he got AIDS, he said. Cathy sat opposite him, blinking, watching him heave the food into his face and chew it with his mouth wide open, so she could see the soggy lumps of food on his tongue. He didn't talk to her. It felt a lot like the night he had first arrived, because Dad didn't talk to them either.

"If you want to be accepted into this family, you'd better be accepted into God's, lad," he said sternly, his teeth snapping closed and open around the words. "I'll bloody well expect you at confirmation. I will bloody well expect it."

Heathcliff nodded sullenly.

"And you best be askin' God to forgive you tonight, both of you," he continued, "Cathy, how hard is it to be a good lass?"

Cathy grinned at Heathcliff, and he stared at her with eyes like a dead bird and did nothing. "It's very hard, for me."

"Then you'll be trying harder, or you'll both be out on your arses," Dad grumbled. That was the last word spoken. After that Cathy retreated to the sitting room to watch TV after being instructed to leave Mum alone, and Heathcliff went wandering again. Howard was stomping around upstairs. Dad started barking something at him just after she heard him walking down the stairs. The news blathered its usual panic and destruction. Cathy sat by the window, leaning over the back of the sofa staring out onto the moors through the gap between the curtains. The rain spattered against the windows like wet sand, and outside the night was a ripple of dark green and blue and black, as though she was face down in the sea at night. She wondered where the birds were sleeping in the rain – did it fall through the leaves in the trees, make them wet and cold? Did they hide? Could they see the same in the dark?

She sat back and thought of Heathcliff, a lonely bird. She imagined him hiding from rain in his nest, shaking in the cold, eating scraps of bread off the grass in the park, blind. It was so very sad, and even though he had been mean she would forgive him. He wanted a friend really. Who wouldn't have?

He would be in the hallway, she imagined, curled up in the corner by her door most probably. The heat from the two radiators circulated and met there in a cosy chasm, it was the perfect place. She popped up from her seat and made her way up the stairs, humming Kookaburra to comfort herself in the dark. He was right where she expected, wearing Howard's old grey pyjamas.

"Heathcliff," she told him, sticking her nose in the air, "I'm going to bed now, and I promised you that you could stay in the room."

He blinked at her from under his hair. He decided he would answer to that name, if she thought it nice.

"Oh, are you not talking to me now?" she hissed. "Well, fine then. If don't want to be my friend, I don't really care. I've got plenty of friends at school anyway." With that, she walked into her room, leaving the door open for him. He didn't speak, but the floorboards made their familiar satisfied groan as he stood. He followed her inside. The green canvas camp bed was set up opposite hers. She had put one of her pillows there and a cream coloured blanket.

"Thank you for the pillow," he muttered. She nodded.

"Don't look at me."

"What?" he blurted, terrified. Looking at her seemed to be the only reason to stay here at the moment.

"I'm putting my pyjamas on," she answered directly. "So don't look at me."

"O.K.."

He stood there and waited eagerly.

"Well, turn around then, Heathcliff!"

He smiled at her coyly and turned, folding his arms over his chest. She didn't move for a moment, he saw by her shadow in the wall before him. She paused to see if he would turn around. Assured he wouldn't, the shadow folded into itself like a paper angel, and then stretched. She was pulling her blouse over her head. He gently tilted his nose to the side. From the corner of his eye he saw the length of her back, the skin like brandy cream, delicious looking, taught and soft pulled over her small bones. When she turned he saw the angle of her stomach, slightly, childishly domed above her knickers. The trousers came next. He saw the cobra-tongue-vein beneath her bum, bright blue. He gulped down the taste in his mouth like a burnt fuse.

She slipped the pyjamas on then, pastel-yellow, with daisies on the hems. "You can turn around now," she instructed. He did.

"So, we'll go to sleep now, I suppose," she shrugged, clambering into her bed and yanking the duvet up under her arms. "Turn out the light, will you?"

Heathcliff clicked the light switch and hungered madly for a source of light – he had so been looking forward to this, after all, seeing her asleep. Although she had angered him earlier, still his desire to see her, hear her, feel her hadn't died, or even dampened.

"Heathcliff?" she called through the black gulf between them, "where are you?"

"Here," he whispered to her. She exhaled.

"Will you be able to find the bed?"

"Yeah," he responded dully. The camp bed was thin and sunk dramatically with his weight, forcing him to arch his neck against the pillow. The room went silent, and stayed that way for several minutes. The stillness was then frequently broken by the scratchy sound of him turning on the canvas material.

"Heathcliff!" Cathy growled, "Be quiet!"

"I'm trying to get comfy," he bit back. She made an angry sort of noise, like umph!

"Well, will you hurry up?"

"No!" he growled, and then began tossing and turning rapidly, as though he was rolling down a hillside.

"Oh, shut up!"

"Why don't you shut up, if you want everything to stay quiet?"

She made the angry noise again, and then he next thing he felt was her tiny hand swat him on the shoulder. He swiped out at the air, but caught nothing, and she laughed, sweetly spiteful.

"Silly, you should eat more carrots so you can see in the dark," she whispered. He closed his eyes. He could feel her breath stirring the hairs on top of his head. The notion of her closeness was just wondrous, and hearing her voice so quiet, whispery. The sound rang out in him like a scream through a cut-glass vase.

"Where are you?" he whispered back.

"I'm waiting for you to get up, so we can swap beds."

"Swap?"

"So you'll just shut up!" she snapped.

"But it's your bed."

"Heathcliff," she whispered again, and then her hand pulled the blanket off him. "Come on, I'm getting cold." Her little hand was very cold; he felt it even through his pyjama shirt. He grimaced.

"Well, it's colder here, so get back in your bed," he said carefully.

"But you're not feeling comfy," she stated, as though this was somehow perfect reason for him to allow her to shiver to sleep. He scoffed.

"Well I'm not moving."

"Well neither am I."

There was a small stretch of silence, and then she mumbled, "We can just both get in the bed."

His heart boomed in his mouth.

"But we can't do that."

"Yes we can. Please, I just want to go to sleep now."

That cold little hand crawled over his arm, gentle as a money spider, and then pinched his skin sharply. He jumped, "Ow!"

"Move, then!"

He did as she asked. He sat up, and she guided him by yanking his collar, making him stumbled against the bedside.

"Get in," she demanded. He felt his way under the duvet and slid his legs inside, pleasurably feeling the warm ghost-shape her body had left on the bed sheet. The mattress shifted under him as she climbed inside and flapped the duvet over them both. "Now go to sleep, Heathcliff, or I'll smack ya."

Within a few seconds of lying there she turned to face him, murmuring something sleepily. Her fingers were curled up on his pillow, close to his cheek. Her breath was like that sugary fresh-baked warmth on bread. Her mouth puckered in her sleep and her face twitched with the beginnings of a dream. He watched it, awe-struck, biting his lower lip. "Cathy," he whispered.

She opened her eyes.

"Would you smack your friend?"

"Probably not," she sighed.

"Then I want to be your friend."

"Alright," she answered.

Her fingers cracked open like a carnivorous plant. He took it as an invite to place his hand inside. Her fingers closed.

A/N: So concludes chapter three!

Thank you to the gorgeous cherry-magpie-x, the delectable Cocoriot and the absolutely squillion-percent scrumptious Ashirogi-Muto-L (honestly, these fanboys, what are they like?) for their reviews – your enjoyment and encouragement has been the driving force for this chapter being written, I'd be nowhere without it!

I hope everyone enjoys, and please let me know what you think.