She stood at the worktop and buttered her toast. Surely she was too old to feel angry. She wished the sensations would go away. There was no need for them, and it was rude of them, in her quiet kitchen, to think they could intrude when she was supposed to be getting dressed and getting ready for a normal day that had just one little bump in it. They had begun to intrude more and more, edging in until it seemed normal to see them inside the door, sitting on the kitchen floor, crouched at the foot of her chair. Soon they’d find their way into her bedroom. Then she’d have to take a sleeping draught to keep them away.

She’d spent her life believing things could be compartmentalised, kept apart by scissors and sticky tape, labelled and stuck down with no risk of one image sneaking over to another. She’d had her mother page, where she’d been Neat, Solemn, Quiet to the point of Piousness. On her aunt’s page were Good Manners, Amusing Chatter and Gossip. With her father she was Pretty and Happy; with her brother, Un-minding and Stoic – it had all worked surprisingly well until she’d grown up and left home. But as an adult, the overlay of romances, children and divorce had smudged the cut outs and she’d returned to the pages to find they had bled one into another. Who could she be to her brother now? Why did Neat no longer work with her mother? It was as if survival was a debt she must repay by ghastly examination. She didn’t want to peel the images apart. She didn’t want to look. She should tell her mother to stuff it, but was over-ruled by a small girl in pig tails with a bird book trying to pour tea without spillage. What about loyalty? Yet she returned, week after week to attend to that disappearing life as if it had offered her warmth. Her brother said she was a fool, yet the older she got, the younger she became. She’d got along perfectly well for forty-four years refusing to be affected by anything. Why start now? But, like everything else in the childhood that crept upon her, it felt beyond her control.

She rubbed her chest with the heel of her hand. She wanted to put the contents in the sink with her cup, wash them up, pour them away. Of course she couldn’t. She had to clench her jaw, go upstairs and get dressed. She kept a firm grip on the knife as she ran the blade under hot water.