Sixty-four, sixty-five. Sixty-six. Pushing, pressing. Vamos, chica.

Small-kid knock. Small-kid voice.

The pain is yellow.

‘Wolfie, are you ready? I’m not yelling, cos Dad says I’m not allowed to yell. But he says we have to go and are you ready?’

Seventy-four. I run out of numbers. Or I stop, I don’t know.

I stand up and the world rushes to my head. My hands fly out and catch hold of the sink, and the girl in the mirror looks back, white and clammy. I try to answer, but my mouth makes useless, silent shapes as the room spins slowly around me like a mirror ball. I think of the half-moon shape of my mother downstairs and feel a sudden painful urge for home, where the bedrooms are small and the distance to the sofa is short.

‘Are you, Wolfie? Are you ready?’

I close my eyes and the girl in the mirror disappears.

I can’t remember when it started but I remember when it started again.

I was seven years old, and it was actually on my (real) seventh birthday that I began to figure a few things out. The biggest one being that my mother wasn’t like most other people’s.

On that momentous day, one minute I was dancing around the house in the Hello Kitty trainers my dad and Meiko had sent from Japan, which lit up every time my feet hit the floor, then the next everything had gone to shit. At that age I probably didn’t think of it as going to shit, but now I can see that’s definitely where it went.

I’d pony-stepped down the hallway in my illuminated shoes and flung open the door to my mother’s bedroom to show her just how great they were. It took me a few blinks to see her, sitting on the floor in the semi-dark with the curtains closed and the padded post pack from Japan beside her. Her knees were hugged to her chest and she was heaving with huge, silent spasms. When she raised her head at the sound of my voice, a woman I’d never seen before looked back at me.

Even though she quickly rearranged her face back into my mother, it took too long and it was too late. I remember wondering if it was possible for someone’s heart to pop right out of their body, and it was a surprise to look down and see the skin on my chest completely still considering what was going on in there.

‘It’s OK. It’s OK, Wolfie. I’m all right, come here,’ Lou said, and she opened her arms to me. ‘It’s just a game. Don’t worry, I’m pretending, that’s all.’

I may have only just turned seven, but I knew it was no game. That she’d been as real as the flashing shoes on the ends of my feet, that other woman, but that somehow she was also my mother. My heart battered away and my seven-year-old brain hummed as it tried to make sense of what was happening. Was she sad because Dad and Meiko hadn’t sent her anything? But it was my birthday, so why would they? Should I offer her one of the trainers? But that didn’t make sense, because what would a grown-up want with one or even a pair of flashing trainers?