I thought of Kevin, our neighbour who sat in his back garden and puffed away on big white roll-ups, the unmistakable scent drifting over the fence, reaching my nostrils as I sat out there in all weathers, waiting patiently for my mother to finish up with her customers.

That was all I knew of drugs: funny-smelling fags that weren’t such a big deal seeing as you could smell them practically everywhere you went on my little council estate.

The girl who told me what I hadn’t known about my mother was called Suzanne. She was small and wiry and looked like a ferret. Like me, she was friendless, and looking back, I think now it would have made sense for us to reach out to each other. But in her desperation to be liked, she bullied me.

She made her announcement in front of my brand-new class, before the teacher came into the room. In shock, I said nothing. Instead, I thought about my home, the door to the bedroom that I mustn’t enter if it were closed, the matches and ashtrays and that peculiar scent that I’d put down to Kevin next door but often smelled like it was coming from upstairs.

I wasn’t sure which was worse: my mother the prostitute or my mother the drug addict.

The girls in the class, those well-adjusted, well-liked girls that Suzanne and I would never be, jumped on her proclamation. Whore, druggy, slag, scag. Words that started as a whisper were picked up and passed around, until the classroom was roaring.

‘She’s not!’ I found my voice at last, and even though it trembled, I said what I was supposed to. I denied it.

‘Settle down, come on now.’ The teacher came in, bodies scattered into seats, laughter and pointed looks hung in the stale, sweaty air.

From beneath lowered lids I watched the girls who had called my mother those names.

‘Where’s your dad?’ hissed Suzanne. ‘Was he one of her punters?’

Punters.

My mother called the men in her room ‘customers’. They used to be referred to as her ‘friends’, but that had changed since I’d got older. Two different words that meant the same thing.

The teacher stood in front of the class, coffee-stained shirt, bright eyes and unflattering glasses. As he settled in behind his battered desk, he promised us that the next few years would be among the best of our lives.

He lied.

For once, my mother’s door was open when I got home, and she was in the kitchen, propped up against the worktop, still in her dressing gown.

I watched her for a while, trying to remember the last time I had seen her in clothes. My mind worked backwards until I recalled her taking me to town at the start of the summer holidays to buy my new school uniform. Six weeks ago.