I have a sense, as we enter the tiny ticketing hall and shuffle with the crowd towards the entry barriers, that things have changed since we came through them earlier today. Shifted a little. I feel, for the first time in years, on the margins of hope. But hope, just like pride, can come before a fall. I’m not counting on the rogue mirror to the left of the barriers, a frameless square – pitted and dulled – which lurks as unconcerned passengers, their blank faces only to be written on by the afternoon, pass by. I don’t reckon on catching my eye in it and realizing, with a jolt, that I can never be unconcerned. This waiting trap is not so pocked and murky that I can’t see my concealer has been erased by both the Hello Kitty backpack and the rain. I am not so blinded by shiny new adventures that I can’t witness, in this sudden looking-glass ambush, the streak, the flash, the burn of my birthmark – indelible and always there, no matter how I try to hide it.

CHAPTER 15

I had a sewing box when I was a kid, which Nonna bought me one birthday. It was hexagonal and had a creaky raffia lid with red and orange raffia flowers embroidered on it. She laughed when I unwrapped it, said she thought it was pretty and you never knew, I might find it useful. I had laughed, too. I wasn’t really a sewing kind of girl. Crafts that involved sticking things? Yes. Cutting doll’s hair into harsh asymmetric bobs? Yes. The contents of this box – everything a girl who likes sewing might need – went unused. Sorry, Nonna. But I found a purpose for that sewing box. I wrote secret notes to myself which I folded into small squares and hid under the soft material needle book and the clanking reels of cotton and the plump Japanese lady pincushion.

Some were in the form of questions: ‘When will someone love me?’ (I meant boys, of course. My father loved me a lot, I knew that. His love was like a warm jumper I never wanted to take off.) ‘Will it ever happen to me?’ (Really bad pop song territory.) ‘Will I ever be beautiful?’ (A question with an absolute answer.) Sometimes they were whimsical statements, written in red or green, by one of those pens where you slide bars down to get different colours: ‘When I fall in love I shall sink like a stone.’ (Terrible.) ‘One day, the light of love will shine on me.’ (Excruciating nonsense.)