‘Oh, Vince,’ she kept whining. ‘Oh, Vince, I’m so sorry.’ She quickly became a very broken record. She repeated herself over and over, one whiny ‘sorry’ after another layering up, until the sitting room was a nauseating fog of them and Dad snapped, ‘That’s enough, Ellen!’ She then became fascinated by Dad’s first guide dog, Sunny. We’d had her for two months or so. She was amazing. Mum kept saying ‘Awww’ and ‘Oh, would you look at her?’ and ‘Bless her little heart!’, until I wanted to snap, ‘That’s enough, Ellen!’ too.

Apart from that, Mum didn’t have much to say. She didn’t ask us how we were. She didn’t ask me about my new school or how bullying the kids were, on a scale of one to ten (about a nine and a half), or about my bra. She just prattled on a bit about her new ‘man’, Dave, and how he was taking care of her in a little place on the Old Kent Road, all the time staring at Dad. How she was going to go down the Job Centre and get a job, just as soon as they got a permanent address; how she would soon be getting herself ‘sorted’ so she’d have the ‘energy’ to be in our lives more (how much energy did it take to be a mother? I wondered) and wouldn’t that be great?

‘You really can’t see anything, Vince?’ she drawled. Then, when he said ‘no’ – his face all set and weird-looking – she wheedled another, ‘Aww, you poor thing’, like Dad was a very old dog that was about to be put down. Eventually, she slouched after Dad like a punky scarecrow into the kitchen and there was lots of whispering and a loud, ‘Oh clever, you! You know where the kettle is, Vince!’ The kettle boiled but they didn’t come out holding mugs of tea. Dad looked angry and Mum scuttled out the door, after flinging two packets of Flying Saucers at Angela and me and blowing us theatrical kisses.

We didn’t see her again until 1984. There was only one more vignette to come. One more memory. One more character popped out from the book of her life, of which we knew so little and which she so absolutely wanted to keep us from reading, or even looking at the pictures. She remained a series of paper dolls to Angela and me: thin and without substance, unable to be pinned down or held on to; a papery wisp of a mother who fluttered in a wavering slipstream of her own design, always out of reach …

CHAPTER 13