I’d left those details out, not because they weren’t true – they were, I remembered them clearly – but because the story surrounding them was not.

I’d always known it. I knew it at the time, even at four. The events were the same – the lullaby, the cooking – but not the meaning. Dad had made up a different meaning for my sake. Maybe for his sake too – maybe he needed it as much as I did. He constructed an alternative version, a version I could choose – that Mum and I had been playing, that it was all pretend – to make everything feel safe again.

But the truth wasn’t safe, not at all. The truth was that Mum wasn’t pretending. She wasn’t playing. She was drunk and sick and then she was passed out cold. She was passed out and I was left all alone. I was alone at four. When I had begun to cook dinner I wasn’t playing, I was deadly serious. I was afraid and panicked – someone had to be Mum, there had to be a mum, someone in control. It would have to be me. And when we had all slept together on the kitchen floor, it wasn’t because we were a funny and carefree and kooky kind of family, it was because Dad and I couldn’t move her and we couldn’t leave her. The truth was we were scared she might die. And somehow, in the imperfect logic of the four year old, it was all my fault.

Dad’s story was much better. I participated in the telling of Dad’s story, laughing at the right times, singing the song for whoever he was telling, all the words, from start to finish.

Over the years there were other stories to be learned and invented and told. Many stories, covering many events: like the time Mum yanked me out of bed and got me dressed for school on a Saturday morning – Dad said that she was just so busy that she got her days mixed up; or the time she passed out and pissed herself on the new couch, the new couch before the latest new couch, and Dad said that she was just so exhausted from being so busy that she fell asleep there in her clothes and that it was actually Nintendo the cat who had pissed on the couch – I’d kept it to myself when I found Mum’s piss-soaked clothes reeking in the laundry sink, not to ruin a good story. Or there were the countless times I woke up to her yelling about god-knows-what at Dad in the middle of the night – I only ever heard quiet murmurs from him in response: they didn’t even offer a story for those ones, they were simply not spoken about. Or the nights when Dad had to make her go to bed, help her up the stairs – ‘exhausted’ again. Sometimes, on those nights when Dad couldn’t avoid mentioning the obvious influence alcohol was having on her state, he would pass it off as ‘oh, you’ve had one too many, you duffer,’ or ‘maybe you nudged it a bit hard tonight, my love’ as he hauled her off the couch and up the stairs. And the countless times she would not be where she had said she’d be, or back as soon as she’d said she’d be – failing to pick me up from after-school practice, or leaving the house to go and buy milk and turning up hours later with booze on her breath, a ‘plausible’ story, and no milk.