Then we were both laughing, hard and loud, as the years fell away into dust, and when it settled it wasn’t on two sad, flawed adults who’d lost their way and lost their heads. It was on a ten-year-old boy and his dot of a sister – two kids so close they threw the same shadow.

In that moment I wasn’t really thinking about anything else, except how I never knew it could be this easy to be happy, so I really couldn’t say who saw Wolfie first, or how long she’d been standing there in the doorway, white as a sheet with a mug of tea in each hand.

Both of which missed, incidentally, but not for want of trying.

37

Wolfie

It’s so quiet I can hear the 78 per cent of nitrogen in the air moving around the room – information I have thanks to last week’s chemistry homework. I can hear the mice snacking in the walls and the deafening sound of tea dripping down Dom’s embossed cream wallpaper and I’m already thinking about how I’m going to clean it off.

I’m looking straight at Lou, but I’ve got Danny pegged in the corner of my eye. He’s frozen to the spot, one hand pressed hard against his mouth like he thinks he could have stopped my mother’s words. But they’ve already burned a smoking path through my eardrums and, funnily enough, it’s not until this very moment I realise that I hadn’t really believed she’d done it.

She did it.

I want to yell in her face, grab her by the shoulders and shake out some answers. Who does that? I want to say. What kind of person? What kind of mother thinks it’s OK to do that to her fifteen-year-old kid? Fifteen.

I don’t say a thing and I’ve never felt more fifteen.

Lou’s eyes are on me and I hold steady because I know I can outstare her. I’m the strong one, I scream in my head. And you did that, you made me this way. Because somebody’s got to look after us. I feel the sweat gaining momentum in my hairline and a drip lands on my eyelashes. I blink and for a sharp, salty couple of seconds it feels as good as crying. When I can focus again, she’s looked away. Knew it.

Suddenly, I feel more powerful than I ever have before. Is this how it is, then? Walk on eggshells. Do not disturb. Maintain equilibrium. Keep things on the level. Stay on the down low. Don’t upset Lou. Careful what you say. Careful what you do. Grow up. Take better care. Take on the world. Suck it up. Suck it in. Hold it in.

Well, fuck it. A la mierda. Fuck it all, fuck them both, and don’t pardon the French. Now I get it. Now I know I wasn’t enough to make her stay.

She’s paler than I’ve seen her before. More than after two weeks on a sofa holiday. More than when I fell off the monkey bars at school and broke my arm. More than when they brought her back from her leg surgery, when I thought at first they’d wheeled in an empty bed. But once the nurse started fussing with drips and monitors and I realised that tiny white bump under the hospital sheet was my mother, every other awful moment, every sinking feeling, every night I’d cried myself to sleep with half a box of tissues stuck in my mouth to keep the noise down, had evaporated into insignificance. She’s paler than then, even.