He wakes up hungry. It isn’t his hunger, but it sits inside him. It swallows his food and leaves him still empty. The thing in him is a hole and a parasite all at once. He feels the texture of it inside him, a roughness, a dirtiness, vast and intimate.

When his dad tries to touch him he pushes him away.

Three weeks in, on his day off, he walks up on the moors. He walks through the forest, up onto the lip of the wide-open heath. He walks across it. He walks far enough that he can no longer see the valley the town sits in, can no longer see anything but a flat, featureless space.

The wideness of it soothes him. There is emptiness here, to match anything he feels.

The summer progresses. The thing inside Dillon loosens its grip a little.

He’s sad, now, in a way he wasn’t before. He isn’t constricted, held, racked by it. It’s just there, in the normal way of things, and he can name it.

He speaks to Alisha one night. She knows his mother is dead. But he’s never said more than that bald fact. They hold hands. He speaks in phrases that he’s heard, that feel like they should be right, but that don’t quite fit the particularities of his personal grief.

‘I feel like I let her down.’

No, he doesn’t. She let him down.

‘But maybe I’m angry with her.’

Not that either. This feeling isn’t anger.

‘No, not that. I just – you regret things. I can’t believe she’s just – gone.’

He can believe it. That’s what is so overwhelming. That fact, that certainty, is exactly what’s thrown him.

In the end, the holding hands is enough. The stuttering out of something, even if it’s only the faintest outline of what’s inside.

If he had the words, he might say that he has as many separate relationships with his mother as he has cells in his body, and they all are grieving in different, often contradictory ways. There are parts of him that despise her weakness. Parts that think she deserved it, that she brought it on herself. That she chose to drink, and that if anything her punishment was not enough.

And then, the parts of him that were formed by her, that exist in the space between them, they cry out. They have no voice. They are a touch, a breath, a daily presence. Language. Love. The tics of accent and perception. They are him, the deepest parts of him, and with her gone, they are bereft.

Sometimes he catches his face at an angle in the mirror, and he sees her. He speaks, and he hears her. He drinks, and he feels her thirst.