My mother is dead. My mother died over two months ago, they tell me. I will never see her again. Never. That is not a concept I can grasp. Dr. Robinson says I have locked the information away. She’s right. It feels like somebody told me in a dream; as if another Connie knew it, another Connie in another dimension. I feel divided up: this Connie, me, is occupying only a small part of myself. If I were a house I would be in the hallway surrounded by doors that are all shut. I have curled up in a ball on the floor.

I want a visitor. I’m so lonely I’m forced to have a conversation with the Squeak. She’s head down in her word search now and has chosen ‘Modes of Transport’, for crying out loud.

‘Do you know if my father’s going to come and see me?’ I ask her.

She runs her short triangular finger up and down the letter columns and shrugs. ‘I’m not psychic.’

I miss my mum.

‘Have you ever seen someone overdose?’

‘Yup,’ she says, carefully circling the word dumptruck.

‘Is it a painful death?’ I ask her. I’m really hoping not, I’m hoping she just went to sleep.

‘It’s agony,’ she says. She’s on a roll: caravan. ‘You puke up your guts.’

I try not to think about it. I shut that door and open my old Dell.

* * *

I puked up my guts, Dr. R; I did it there on the Twister mat after listening to them fucking. It was a visceral thing, a great purging from my centre. It’s a blur now, what happened straight afterwards, but somehow I must have mopped it up and I remember watching the rest of Toy Story 3 with Annie in my arms, resting my chin on her wimple, feeling like I’d been punched hard in the face, my eyes stinging. At some stage Josh came back from soccer and he seemed different to me, like he had grown since he left the house: his voice was deeper, his hair darker; he had become a man in those few hours. ‘You all right, Mum?’ he asked. ‘Fine,’ I said, smiling, and that seemed to suffice. I watched a version of myself making him some beans on toast. He thanked me, ate it, got out his phone and went up to his room. I took Annie upstairs too. She chatted away, making the most of my vagueness, asking me if she could borrow £100 to set up an ice-pop business. With difficulty – for she was practising being chewed to death in a garbage-crushing machine and was acrobatically rolling about on the top bunk – I got her into bed and tucked her in to her unchanged world, and then I sat on my bed, where nothing was familiar at all.