She slapped butter onto slices of white bread, added spam then pushed one slice down on top. My stomach grumbled and I waited for her to hand me my sandwich, but she walked past me out of the kitchen with the sandwich in hand.

‘Mother?’ I repeated.

‘I’m busy. You can make your own lunch. You’re plenty old enough for that now.’

I felt like I’d been slapped. She left the room and went back upstairs.

Mother always made me my lunch if she was home, which she usually was, and she always, always made me my lunch on my birthday. One year she placed a candle on the sandwich and told me to blow it out and make a wish. That was on my seventh birthday. That year I had wished that Polly would come back, but of course she never did.

On my eighth birthday Mother had brought me a red cupcake covered with the most delicious white cream. When I had blown out the candle, I had silently wished to go outside into the back garden just once before I died. Mother had not given me any more birthday candles, but I had still made the same secret wish when I turned nine, ten, eleven and twelve: to go into the back garden before I died.

My shoulders prickled. A headache hummed in my temples.

I had not made this year’s birthday wish yet. There was no point in wishing for the back garden because Mother had already said no. Perhaps when I was older … if I live that long.

I drifted towards the blinds. A layer of dust feathered each wooden panel. I drew my finger along the bottom panel and inspected the pad of dust on my fingertip. It was grey and furry. Mother’s and my skin and hair and who knows what else was hidden in there amongst the million other particles of dirt and grime. Gross, like the smell of gone-off spam.

I rinsed the dust off my finger, my gaze lingering on the blinds. Behind those blinds lay wooden boards and behind those boards lay glass. Behind the glass lay the back garden, where the strange sound had come from. I listened intently and heard nothing. All was quiet out there right now. Perhaps it had been my imagination playing games, driven wild by my desire to go out there and experience the other world.

I glanced at the kitchen door. It too was blacked out, boarded up, locked and bolted so no light could invade the cottage.

My chest twittered with the closeness of outside. There would be grass and flowers and maybe a lovely, adorable robin showing off, like Mary Lennox’s robin. A creature I could talk to besides Mother, even though it could not talk back. Someone, perhaps, who loved me.

Mother loves me.

But now she’s got Clarabelle, she won’t love you any more.