As soon as she smiles her face opens and softens, and she seems so much younger. She settles herself on my bed, sitting back against the pillows.

‘Nice threads,’ she says, fingering the duvet cover.

‘A leaving present from home,’ I say.

She considers me very carefully. ‘Is there no going back?’

Mother’s bloated face floats before me. She’s got so much worse in recent years; there’s not even a trace of the woman who used to love to dress me up in pretty clothes and braid my hair into a French plait, who smiled when people would say, ‘What a beautiful daughter you have.’ I think back to our ‘pink-party days’ when she’d buy me my favourite food – anything pink, like strawberry jam, plums, marshmallows. We’d go to the shopping centre and order two Mister Whippys with sticky raspberry sauce. But now, she scowls if someone calls me pretty, taking it as a direct slur on her own waning looks. Now, she has special pink food, like prawns and taramosolata, just for herself in the fridge. Now, she spits and hisses and acts possessed, although she likes to tell me I am. Now she visits me in the night and I don’t know whether I’m going to be hugged, or cried on, or cut, or stared at, or touched, like that last night, the night she crossed the line. No, there is no going back. I shake my head, once, forcibly.

‘I know what it can be like, love, but there has to be another way. Have you been to social services?’

I don’t think this woman has a clue who she’s dealing with. No way am I going to be put into a reform school or foster care with some other mad fucking family telling me what to do. Anyway, no one would believe me when they met the so-called abusive parents, from a perfectly respectable family home on the south side.

‘Not going to happen.’

‘If I could do it again another way, I would.’

‘You’re not me.’

‘Right, try to get some sleep and let’s talk tomorrow. I may be able to hook you up with someone who’ll look after you.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks. I can look after myself.’

‘Is that why you were hysterical?’

‘It was funny.’

She looks at me in a way that says, it’s anything but funny, but doesn’t patronise me by saying it. She gets up and pats my arm before she leaves the room, leaving the door ajar. ‘I’m on the floor above,’ she says from the doorway.

After she leaves I want to curl up in her arms.

13. Nico

13

Nico