She looked at me, reached over and dragged me inside, shoving the door shut with the comb in her fist. ‘Who you gonna go with?’ she said.

It was too quick, she was holding the comb over me, I didn’t want to get it wrong, and I didn’t know what it meant, so I said, ‘What about you?’

She pushed me away against the door and said, ‘Coward!’

I wasn’t ready. It felt like I’d closed the door on my dad and shut out my mum, but no one properly asked me or told me what was going on, and they all knew. Why wasn’t she telling me? I wanted to grab her hair and pull it out. I wasn’t scared of her.

‘You look ugly,’ I said, ‘I’m not going with you.’

She looked over her shoulder and flashed her eyes at me, ‘You’re not going anywhere, you’ve got to help me.’

‘Why?’

She turned her back on me and looked in the mirror, passing the comb over her long twists.

‘Make him get her back.’

There was a woman helping Mr Adebisi pack away things into a suitcase in the front room. I looked round the door and saw my dad watching from the sofa with Manus and Connor on one side of him but they weren’t getting up to help, so I looked across at Mr Adebisi to see what he was doing. The woman was bending over the suitcase and the backs of her legs were fleshy with creases because she didn’t have anything on them. She was tall on wobbly shoes and her skirt was up short over her bum. She stood up and I couldn’t look, so I looked down. There were red shadows round her knees – I didn’t know what my mum’s knees looked like before, but I was looking at them. She was in a miniskirt on high heels, and her hair was bunched up on top in a twisting hairstyle so she looked taller, and she had white lipstick on with thick white eyelashes curling up. I didn’t recognise her. But she’d come back.

‘Who’s that?’ Busola said, coming in behind me.

My dad turned and said, ‘That’s your mother, look at her.’