When the argument started to get going properly, she was already a good distance away.
Even if they came out of the caravan now, she thought, they wouldn't be able to spot her so easily.
They were too caught up in the drama of it all anyway, as usual.
She followed the path around another row of tents just behind the shower building, straining against the uneven surface as one wheel of the push chair got caught on a root.
Lately, she had begun to question whether all adults argued (the Gooding family, at least, appeared to be able to spend their holidays peacefully, laughing and joking over the dinner table set out under the pines), and whether it was normal that she got so afraid.
It had begun when her dad had caught her mum’s finger in the car door outside a restaurant. Her mum screamed like she had never heard her scream before, and her dad said: “shut up, stupid bitch”. Having freed her bleeding finger from the car, her mum then refused to enter “a restaurant where people know I’m a stupid bitch”. She would have laughed at that if it wasn’t so sad. “I want to go home”, her mum said, and she had climbed back in the car as her dad drove them back to the campsite.
Immediately, he started to disassemble the tent. “I didn’t mean ‘home’”, he mum cried, exhausted, “I meant, back here!”
She didn’t want to hear anymore, so she took her little brother, put him in the push chair and started walking.
She didn’t care that she was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes; all she wanted was a sunset on the beach.
“Look”, she told her little brother as they watched the red sun go down over the bay.