Cover

Dedication

For my niece

Niamh Elliot

with love

PART I

1

My parents loved each other. They were always hugging, holding hands, touching. If separated in a crowd, they’d exchange passionately adoring glances. Parted by distance, they’d pine and make frequent phone calls. They rarely used their given names, the plain John and Eve everyone else used; instead it was ‘darling’, ‘honey’, ‘sweetheart’ and other various nicknames, the most nauseating of which was ‘sex bomb’ for her, ‘stud’ for him, these last only used in the privacy of their home.

Where I lived.

Their love was exclusive, inward-looking, nothing remaining for anyone else, not even the children these self-obsessed people had brought into the world. The children they’d named Allison, Beth and Cassie but dismissively referred to as A, B and C or, as I overheard my mother calling us once… the ‘alphabet sprogs’.

We weren’t mistreated, not really. Hard to mistreat someone you barely acknowledged being alive. We offspring of these two were fed, and clothed, but little money was spent on procuring either.

Our eyes were opened when we went to school and, as the eldest of the three sprogs, I was first to suffer for the sin of being ‘different’.

I was the child the other children laughed at; my thin, spindly body clothed in well-worn, badly fitting, charity-shop clothes. The child who from self-preservation became a skilled, believable liar.

Lies to save face – the ones when I insisted I wasn’t hungry as classmates unwrapped their lunchtime sandwiches, my mother’s attitude being if I didn’t want to eat the meagre bread and jam provided free by the school, I could do without. Jam sandwiches, no butter so that the bread was soggy, the resultant mess unappetising. Maybe I’d have eaten it, hungry as I was, if taking one of those vile offerings hadn’t pushed me further down in the already low estimation of my classmates.

Lies to protect me from my mother’s ire when a teacher asked if I’d eaten breakfast the morning I fainted. Even at a young age I was aware that although my parents didn’t care about their children, they did care about how they were perceived by authority.

Lies to cover my petty thieving, the bars of chocolate, packets of crisps, anything I could slip into my pockets or my scuffed, raggedy schoolbag.

I was the child other children laughed at.

The child who gazed about her and wondered why her life was so incredibly sad.

2

Allison met Peter at a party given by Lorraine, a work colleague she wasn’t particularly friendly with. The invitation was unexpected and Allison, who wasn’t keen on social gatherings of any sort and work ones in particular, desperately searched for an acceptable excuse to avoid an event where she’d have to make small talk with people she wasn’t keen on.