She leant her weight on me to put her shoe back on. I gave her the hanky. I spat on it first so she there was something wet she could use to get the blood off her forehead. We proceeded with dignity to the tram stop. I lit a cigarette for her with her Glomesh cigarette lighter. She puffed absently on the cigarette, and the blood, wetted by the spit, smoothed away until it was really just like she had a bit of a bump on her forehead. ‘Good boy, O-yo,’ she said to me. ‘There’s money for the tickets in my purse.’

Poor Mother, she was quiet as a lamb on the way home. I don’t know where Papa was. I don’t know where Mr Parish was. I don’t know where you were, Ornella.

Where was everyone?

Mother looked out the window and she hardly even puffed on her cigarette now. It burnt down and down until I had to remove it so it didn’t burn her fingers.

On Friday I went to school, even though she hadn’t wanted me to. She got up and made me toast with honey and sandwiches with white bread (also with honey) for my lunch. I had already decided I would go to La Coccinella after school. I didn’t think I could bear to see Mother anymore with her bunged-up head and dead eyes. I couldn’t think about her book going through the shredder either. The story was in the newspaper again that day, I checked at the milk bar. It was on page seven: ‘Author’s book to be pulped’. ‘Mr McMannish of Vellum Press has signalled the publisher’s intention to withdraw The Poems of Veda Gray from sale on the grounds of indecent language.’

So that was it. I left the newspaper on its stack. I bought a packet of cigarettes. Real cigarettes. Not Fags, which were training cigarettes made of sugar. You could still get candy called Nigger Boy in those days. You could get Blackie Toothpaste. But you couldn’t say fuck in a poem, not if you were a woman. Not if you were a respectable one.

I bought a real packet of cigarettes. I had pinched enough money from the jar in the kitchen. Cigarettes didn’t cost much. No one cared if a kid bought cigarettes—how many times had I bought them for Mother? The shopkeeper didn’t flinch. I bought a packet of Craven and I smoked them in the lane off Church Street. I smoked three of them in a row and then I threw up in the gutter.