Cover

MOTHER LOVES ME

Abby Davies

Dedication

To Mum and Dad

Epigraph

Little Simplicity

Dear little Simplicity’s

Five years old,

She thinks that the moon

Is made of gold.

She fancies the stars

That shine so bright

Are put out in the morning

And lit at night.

She thinks that her Dollies

Are really alive.

But then, you know,

She is only five.

And we’re good friends,

She and I,

And I know she’ll be wiser,

By and by.

Ernest Nister

Chapter 1

Mother had painted my face every morning for as long as I could remember and today was no exception. But today was different in one way. It was Friday, 23 April 1976. My thirteenth birthday. Today I was another year older.

This fact clung to me like the plague, oozing and pulsating inside my mind. Beside this terrible fact hovered my big question. A question that made my tummy screw itself up into a hard knot.

If Mother sensed my mood, she did not show it. We sat at the dining room table and Mother placed her make-up bag on her lap. Humming softly, she unzipped the shiny red purse. I wrinkled my nose. The dead roses in the centre of the orange table smelled like urine. They had been dead at least a week, but Mother seemed not to notice.

The first part of me that Mother painted was my forehead. With her tongue pinched between her small, yellow teeth, she smoothed white powder over my skin, working up and along my hairline, down and around my eyebrows then down the bridge of my nose and around my nostrils. She applied powder to each cheek and my upper lip, finishing with my chin and jaw. Eyebrows were next. With a black pencil she coloured in the fair hairs above my eyes. When the pencil was due for sharpening, the lead scratched, but Mother grew angry if I complained or fidgeted, so I counted the freckles on her face to distract myself. I was up to twenty when she moved on to my eyes.

‘So big and blue,’ she murmured, as she often did when she reached this part.

Her warm breath touched my nose and I smelled coffee and buttered toast. I looked at her small, brown eyes, tried to focus on them, focus on anything except the fact that I was another year older. I thought about how unalike our eyes were. I didn’t have freckles, but I did have blonde hair like Mother, whose hair bobbed around her chin. Mine reached my knees. It was ratty at the ends because Mother never cut it. She said she would trim the ends when it reached my ankles. She loved my long yellow hair. Always complained that hers would not grow past her shoulders. Sometimes as she walked by she ran her fingers down my hair, admiring its glossy feel.