With a glance over my shoulder to check I was alone, I slid my fingertips into the dip and opened the glass door. A squeal of hinges made me jump and I quickly closed the door, darted back and tripped over my own feet. I fell hard on my bottom and rolled my eyes at my clumsiness. Moving onto my hands and knees, I went to push myself up and stopped. A piece of paper was sticking out from behind the clock. I stretched out my arm and tugged on the paper. It slipped out and I stared at it, amazed to see a black-and-white photograph of Mother when she was a girl standing beside a wrinkled old man whose face was all scowl. That must be him. Mother’s grandfather. My great-grandfather.

In the photograph, Mother was holding the old man’s hand. She looked pretty in a frilly dress, her hair tied in sweet bunches, but her face looked sad. Her grandfather wore a suit as dark as his glowering eyes. He looked like a shadowy sort of person and I was glad I hadn’t met him.

I brought the photograph closer to my face. Something wasn’t quite right. The picture wasn’t whole. Someone had clearly been cut out of it, because a small, ghostly hand about the same size as Mother’s was tucked into the old man’s other hand, and the person that the hand belonged to had been chopped off the photograph.

Mother was an only child and her parents had died when she was a baby, so maybe the person holding the old man’s hand had been a friend of Mother’s. Maybe that friend had died in a terrible accident. Maybe that friend had been nasty and Mother wanted to forget about them. There were so many maybes that my mind swirled with them.

I turned the photograph over. On the back in Mother’s handwriting, it said Grandfather and me, July 1946, Village Barn Dance. Barn Dance. I pictured a room full of people dressed in bell-bottoms and flouncy blouses dancing around mooing cows and enormous bales of hay. A giggle burst out of me.

The stairs creaked and I slipped the photograph back behind the clock and spun around.

Mother stood in the doorway with her face half-covered by shadows.

‘Have you taken your pill?’ Mother’s voice was sharp.

‘Yes, Mother.’

‘Good doll.’

She handed me a pair of knickers and I pulled them on quickly.

‘Arms,’ she said.

Obediently, I stretched my arms up in the air so that Mother could pull my dress down over my head and onto my goose-bumpy body.

Today’s dress was rich blue with a flouncy, white petticoat sewn in underneath. Mother made all of my dresses. I had worn this one many times before and it was growing a little tight across my chest.