I didn’t listen to what Miss Hayle said to my mother. Instead, I kept my eyes on Mum. She looked okay, I thought. I’d washed her and helped her to dress in a high-necked blouse and an old pair of black trousers. I pinned her hair up and patted powder on her face with a little bit of blusher.

She didn’t look great, but she looked like some of the other mothers I’d seen at the school gates.

‘Don’t open your mouth too wide when Miss Hayle is here,’ I said as I caught a glimpse of her brown teeth, whittled down far more than they should have been by her incessant jaw-clenching.

‘Okay, baby,’ she’d said, obediently.

I looked into her eyes as I rearranged her fringe. Deep pools of baby blue. She had beautiful eyes, I realised, if you ignored the redness in the whites of them.

I will never become you.

I brushed off her gratitude and thought of where I would be when I was her age. I would have a beautiful home, with a kind husband; there would be money for heating and lovely clothes, and hot water would come out of the tap, and I wouldn’t have to read books by torchlight.

She was forty, my mother. It was too late for her, but not for me.

Miss Hayle talked on, showing Mum the same leaflets she had shown me. Every so often she looked up and around the room, and I wondered what it was like to see my home through a stranger’s eyes.

Everything bad was hidden. The burn mark on the windowsill from one of their cigarettes had been covered up with Tippex that I’d stolen from school. The hole in the tablecloth was concealed by a lamp I’d placed strategically over it. The lamp didn’t work because the electricity meter was empty, but it did the trick.

How easy it was to hide the rot, I marvelled, my mother especially. She looked decent, clean, normal. If you scratched at the surface, though, it was all so different. The scars on her chest, the sense of absence in her eyes when you looked a little too closely.

‘You can keep those,’ I said as Miss Hayle picked up the bank statements and benefits letters that I’d found.

She looked at them briefly, the only sign that she was shocked a slight widening of her eyes as she glanced at me. I kept my gaze locked on hers. Yes, see, miss, I need this scholarship.

She left soon after, and I sagged with relief as I showed her to the door. She said goodbye, and I sucked in a big breath and put my hand on her arm.

‘Miss,’ I said, ‘is… is anyone else on the scholarship list?’