"Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Octavia aged 9

I wish I was skinny. Today in school Horatio followed me around the playground chanting "waddle, waddle, waddle!" at me everywhere I went. All the boys were laughing. It's not fair.

Julei can eat and eat and eat and she's still skinny. When she comes to my house our favourite thing is to get an enormous mug of hot chocolate each, full of cream and sugar. Then we get some of those chocolate feathers, you know, the ones that come in different colours and flavours: orange are orange chocolate, red are chilli chocolate, pink are raspberry chocolate - my favourites are the cream coloured ones, they're vanilla chocolate. We take the feathers and dunk them in our hot chocolate for just a moment, then try to eat them before they melt all over our fingers. We always end up covered in chocolate and we have to lick it all off. That's the best part.

Me and Julei are going to be best friends forever. She lets me style her sometimes when she comes over. She's so beautiful – she's the tallest in our class and she's thin and she has skin that is so pale that you can almost see through it. I love drawing on her face and hands with the sparkly paints Daddy gave me. I paint her nails and put her hair up lots of different ways, but she never lets me dye it, even though it would look really pretty. I would dye her hair all the different colours of a pastel rainbow and with her beautiful, pale skin no-one would be able to stop looking at her!

My hair is dyed a nice green colour, like the grass. I chose green because I thought it would help my skin not look so red and blotchy; green and red are opposite colours, we learnt about it in art class. I think it's worked a bit, but it's hard to know. When I'm old enough to dye my skin I'll be able to cover the red with beautiful patterns all over my body. I can't wait but Daddy says I'm not allowed to until I've left school.

When I get home I tell Daddy about Horatio and the boys and he says to ignore it. He called me his 'precious duckling' like always and he gives me some new nail polish. It's beautiful, it looks gold in the bottle, but when you paint it on, you see it's not just gold, it's also amber and bronze and ivory and all the colours in between. I paint my nails with it after dinner and spend a long time just staring at them, changing the light settings in my room to see how that makes the colours different. When I get into bed, Daddy comes to tuck me in.

"Goodnight, my precious duckling."

"Goodnight Daddy. Say goodnight to Mommy for me"

"I will. Sweet dreams Octavia."

He closes the door and I think a bit about Mommy. She stays in their room mostly, but sometimes I get to go in and see her if I can be quiet and still for a while. Before she used to do my hair up for me and teach me about what the next fashions were going to be, but now she just brushes my hair, or sometimes she looks at me for a long time while she holds my hand. Daddy says that when I was really little, Mommy used to go shopping and play games with me and see her friends like other Mommies do. But I think that made her get all tired out so now she has to rest quietly.

One day we learnt in school about some pills that make you have energy so you can go to parties all night and still be able to get up and go shopping the next day. I was so excited, I couldn't wait to get home and tell Daddy. But he said the pills weren't right for Mommy's kind of tired and I shouldn't mention it to her in case it made her feel upset. He said it was a nice idea though.

Thinking about Mommy gives me a feeling that's sort of like being twisted up inside my tummy, so I think about Daddy instead. As I fall asleep, I wonder why he calls me his duckling. I think I would prefer to be called a swan. I must tell him that tomorrow. I dream I'm in charge of a flock of muttation ducks the size of people and I get them to chase Horatio around the playground quacking at him. That would serve him right.