2

I was ten the first time my mum went away ‘for a break’ and came back with a grimace so vague and so permanently fixed that it didn’t slip even when she was asleep. I still see shades of it now, just occasionally, when she’s overtired or overwrought. Violet creases chase each other around her mouth as her face corrugates and sinks. I hate it. I turn away and start to hum silly little childish tunes.

Every night, I’d lie in the bed we shared and curl up as far from her as I could get, terrified of that bland sadness and the emptiness behind it. Knowing that if I turned around and peered through the darkness, I’d see the glisten of moonlight reflected in her staring eyes. I started having nightmares.

Men with wolves’ heads and red wellington boots pursued me through deserted streets. My mum’s face high among the stars called for me to fly up to her, only I couldn’t get my feet to leave the ground. A runaway car with no driver tipped me off the edge of the world, hurtling me through layers of nothingness.

I began to wet the bed, waking the next day chilled and ashamed. Mum would yawn and roll into the damp sheets, hands pressed hard against her flickering, wayward eyelids.

What time is it, Fern? It can’t be morning already. Wake me in an hour.

Granny Ivy agreed to let me have the tiny spare bedroom, the one Grandfather Edgar had died in. I whimpered and weighed the options and concluded that the dead would haunt me less than the living. I washed the sheets through three times to get rid of any ghostly traces and then moved out of the room that had been my mum’s since she was a child, and into my first proper bedroom.

And the bed-wetting stopped.

I saved my pocket money and took a bus into town to buy yellow paint from Woolworth’s. How impressed my mum would be when she heard I’d caught a bus all by myself. But the paint was too thin, the walls too vast, and the old green bled through the delicate primrose like nicotine-stained handprints. I cut pictures of kittens and cute dormice from school friend’s magazines to cover the ugly blotches, and delighted in the shiny jostle of colour.

I missed the scratch and sigh of the old oak tree waving its branches at me, the whisper of its leaves, but I loved my new pink curtains, made from one of mum’s cast-off dresses. They did nothing to block the light but they quivered in the breeze as if they were dancing with the window frames.

I wanted mum to notice my absence. Maybe even miss the warmth and wriggle of my body next to hers in the night, but she never commented on it. At bedtime, when Granny Ivy looked pointedly from the mantelpiece clock to me and put her sewing aside, I’d haul myself to my feet, trail schoolwork and sighs, and fuss over my night time routine. Satchel left packed and ready by the back door, teeth cleaned, clothes neatly folded, and then a return to the front room for goodnight kisses. Waiting for some words of acknowledgement to accompany the scouring-pad scrape of mum’s chapped lips against my forehead.

Haven’t you grown up, Fern, such a big girl in your very own bedroom!

Always waiting.

Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d slide out of bed and tiptoe down the hall. As quiet as a cloud past Granny Ivy’s closed bedroom door, and then into mum’s room. She’d be lying in the scribble of shadows the oak tree conjured in the moonlight and threw across the bed. She never remembered to shut her curtains anymore. Her window wide open, even on the coldest nights. Sometimes she’d shiver uncontrollably in her sleep. I’d struggle with the old wood, try to shut the night out, and sometimes slip into bed beside her to warm her up. I never fell asleep but would wait until she unfolded with the heat I wrapped her in and then I’d t