Once I start on this track I can’t stop. I know it’s not good for me, storing up the memories, taking them out, spitting on them, polishing them so they are as vivid as the moment I’m meant to be living. I’m reliving the exact moment now, and can hear Mother’s footsteps coming up the stairs: I’m twelve, it’s late, maybe two or three in the morning, and she has been drinking all night, alone (she just found out that day that her own dad had died, the man she hadn’t spoken to in over twenty years, the bastard who left when she was a child, so I’ve no idea why she was so mad-sad looper about the whole thing). The door to my room is pushed open and I pretend to be asleep. I’ve learnt at this stage that there is no point talking to her or trying to reason with her when she’s like this. She walks over to the bed and sits down heavily on the side of it, starts to stroke my hair with her hand. ‘Beautiful girl,’ she is slurring. Then I feel a tugging, not unlike the sensation of the stitches earlier, and the mad cow is cutting my hair, in the dark. I don’t move. The following morning, she tells Dad that I did it; look what a state I had made of myself. By this stage I know enough not to take her on, I never win, Dad just ducks out of it and tells me not to ‘rile her’. He takes me to the hairdressers and I have to get a pixie crop, before they were trendy, code for a short, short mess. Not such a beautiful girl now.

At the parent-teacher meeting that year, Mother turned up alone and explained to the teachers that I had done it to myself and that I was disturbed because my father was never there. Mr O’Grady called me into the office and asked if everything was ok at home and if I had anything I wanted to tell him. ‘Yup, my mother is a crazy psycho bitch.’ I was suspended and sent home to that woman.