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When I was 12 years old, my parents finally decided to split me and my younger brother up and give us our own rooms. I was a couple of years older than Alex so I got the bigger space, while he stayed in the box-room. My dad wasn’t too happy about having to move all of his junk down into the garage, but times change and I needed a room for myself.

The four of us lived in a bungalow on a quiet suburban street – a rather reclusive area. Me and Alex would get bored sometimes as there wasn’t much to do, but for the most part, all we needed was each other. Being two young boys with no one else to play with in such a huge neighbourhood, we were as close as two brothers could be.

One day after school, we arrived home to find that all of my belongings had been moved into the the room next to Alex’s. I didn’t expect to feel sad about it at the time, but deep down I knew that sharing a room gave us a stronger bond. After the realisation that we could no longer talk to each other at night, we had to come up with a plan. I devised a childish kind of morse code – a series of taps and scratches that we’d relay to each other on the wall behind our beds. I knew that this way, we wouldn’t get caught talking in the hallway or become bored during the night. After about three months, we had become experts at our secret talking and had managed to learn just over a hundred words. In our few months of doing this, there was one night in particular that stood out amongst the rest.

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A young girl is playing in her bedroom when she hears her mother call to her from the kitchen, so she runs downstairs to meet her mother.

As she’s running through the hallway, the door to the cupboard under the stairs opens, and a hand reaches out and pulls her in. It’s her mother. She whispers to her child, “Don’t go into the kitchen. I heard it too.”