“You just need a good night’s sleep, my girl,” Vera whispers, pulling the material down Iris’s legs, easing it past her feet. I see a mole on Iris’s thigh. Dark brown, slightly raised. She won’t have done a thing about it.

Now Iris sits on the edge of the bed in her bra and knickers, shivering in spite of the stuffy heat of the room. Vera rummages through a chest of drawers in the corner, dropping various bras and scarves on the floor until she finds a T-shirt with a picture of Tom Jones’s face on the front and the word “Sexbomb” printed below it. She pulls it over Iris’s head.

“Now,” she says. “You’re all set.” She reaches behind Iris and does her best to plump the thin, worn pillow there. She puts her hands on Iris’s shoulders, pushes her gently back, picks up her feet, and swivels them onto the bed, covering them with a blanket that she pulls up to Iris’s face and tucks under her chin. “There,” she says.

Iris looks exhausted. Her skin is pale and taut across the bones of her face, her lips dry and almost bloodless. The whites of her startling green eyes are yellowed, like the pages of the girls’ old copybooks that I keep in the attic. Vera leans down to pick up Iris’s jumpsuit, drapes it across her arm. She puts her hand on Iris’s head. “Get some kip, there’s a good girl. You’ll be right as rain in the morning.”

Vera sounds like my mother, who was a great believer in a good night’s sleep. In tomorrow being a new day.

“You don’t mind sleeping with that old geezer, do you?” Vera asks, nodding towards Dad.

Iris shakes her head and doesn’t say anything inappropriate, like Dad having to go on top because she doesn’t have the energy.

Instead, she says, in a soft, barely there voice, “Why did you never say you were sorry?”

For a moment, there is no sound in the room. Anxiety flares inside me.

Vera stands up. “I never deserved forgiveness. So I never asked for none.”

Her tone is matter-of-fact, but she looks away from Iris as she says it. When Iris sighs, her eyes close, the lids coming down slowly, like shop shutters at the end of the day.

13

Never drive if you are fighting sleep.

At home, when I can’t sleep, I roam the house, touching all the dear, familiar things. I make camomile tea. I wrap myself in a blanket and rock on my chair, and the night passes.

Sometimes I even enjoy the sleeplessness, the house sighing and creaking around me like a familiar voice that only I can hear.

Through the floorboards of Vera’s flat, I hear doors banging, people shouting, a dog barking. Outside, the rumble of traffic. My mind fastens on these nocturnal drivers and I wonder who they are and where they’re going at this hour? When there is a lull in the traffic, my mind is dragged back inside. There is a stale heaviness to the air that bears down on me, almost mocks me.