Rosa shrugged her head to the side. ‘Kids, Owen. Look at me. Not cut out to be anyone’s mother.’

‘Don’t you like kids?’ I asked, astonished at this. ‘Don’t you like me?’

‘Oh, yeah, I like you,’ she said. ‘But I wouldn’t want to live with you. Washing your clothes, making your lunch, putting you in the bath, getting the pidocchi out of your hair … pfft, non grazie!’

‘Well, I wouldn’t live with you either,’ I said. ‘You smell like paint most of the time. And when you don’t smell like paint, you smell like …’

I couldn’t think of anything sufficiently disrespectful here, so I left it to linger. But I imagined being a kid of Rosa’s: what would it be like? Would she be cross or happy? Would she cuddle you when you felt scared, or would she snap you out of it? Would she spend long hours painting paintings and forget to make dinner?

And then it occurred to me: maybe Mother was like Rosa. Maybe Mother was not cut out to be a mother. She hadn’t had any more kids after me—maybe having me was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Maybe she didn’t really want me around at all.

It made me sad to think this, because although I sometimes wished she were different, I couldn’t imagine life without her. I didn’t want not to be her son.

NICE LITTLE POEM

Meanwhile, at school, I had a success that I thought would make Mother really happy: I had won a writing competition.

A poster had been put up in the library, and the librarian had tapped me on the shoulder. ‘You’re good with words, Owen,’ she said. I didn’t quite know what she meant by this. ‘Words’, as I understood it, was when grown-ups had arguments. She beamed down at me. ‘You’re very good with words. I bet you could write a nice little poem!’

I liked the school librarian. She was tall and a little stooped and reminded me of Mrs Parish. She’d found me books I really liked when I was little, books like Robert the Rose Horse and Sam the Firefly and A Fish Out of Water. And, of course, Dr Seuss. All the same size books with the same kind of covers. All the same good stories. ‘What would you like to write a poem about, do you think, Owen?’

I didn’t need to think twice. ‘Monkeys,’ I said.

A week earlier, you had taken me to the Richmond Town Hall, Ornella, and there, I had waited in a queue to get my dose of the Sabin oral polio vaccine.

It was a long wait. The hall was cold and crowded. Everyone was tetchy. It took hours to inch towards the front of the queue. And that’s when I heard the conversation about Rhesus monkeys.