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front tooth came out when he bit into the apple in his packed lunch. There were anecdotes about his Power Ranger toys, Thomas the Tank Engine, and Shaggy’s exploits in ScoobyDoo . He talked about his new teacher, Mrs Smith, and how impressed she was with his reading. Lemon gave him a piece of paper and a pen and Ben proved once and for all that he could write his name himself without any help from anyone.
    I was in shock. I had never heard my son like this before. I had simply thought he was a morose child, because morose was how he always was when he was with me. I had never seen this side of him, this laughing chattiness, the non-stop outpouring of everything going on in his life, the pleasure he took from his accomplishments, such as they were. And I felt hurt. Really hurt. Wounded to the core just listening to how natural and happy he could be with a virtual stranger, when I had been trying for nearly five years to have a relationship with him and had come up against brick after brick after brick.
    He made me feel how he had made me feel when he was a baby. Like no matter what I did or how much time I put in or how hard I tried, anyone could walk into his life and they were immediately more important than I was. Like I did not matter. My existence meant nothing. And all the while, as I sat on the periphery of their conversation, I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier, and though I tried to rationalize my way out of it, I just couldn’t stop myself.
    So I left them to finish lunch together and I did more cleaning. Upstairs, I entered the smallest room of the house, Ben’s. I had painted this room while I was pregnant, a pale yellow that had darkened over the years to a colour similar to the skin on a bowl of cold custard. I had chosen yellow because it was a perfect colour for a girl’s room, and neutral enough in case the baby had been a boy. It contained a single bed covered in a yellow quilt, which ran the length of one wall, a small wardrobe and a tiny desk with drawers below. On top of the desk was Ben’s bag for overnighting, his dirty clothes folded neatly beside it. A large car was parked in one corner, left behind when Red had left four years ago, too cumbersome to carry with them at the time, then just forgotten. Since then, Ben had grown so much he could no longer fit inside it.
    To be honest, there was nothing inside the room to clean. This was a space that merely needed the occasional airing. I had left my son downstairs and gone upstairs into his empty bedroom to connect with him. It was ridiculous, but true. I sat down on the bed and held my head in my hands. For the umpteenth time, I wished with all my might that things between me and my son were different, but they had been this way for ever.
    I never wanted a boy. All the way through my pregnancy it was a daughter I prayed for. A living doll to dress up and cherish, who I could sing to and fuss over and love with abandon. Then along came Ben, after a difficult birth; two days’ hard labour, episiotomy, forceps and suction cup, the boy had to be dragged from my body in a screeching, splitting, bloody gush, huge dark balls and willy in disproportion to the rest of his body.
    Red was over the moon. As ecstatic as my father might have been had I been born a boy. He returned to the maternity suite that evening grinning and bearing a blue-ribboned bouquet of long-stemmed white lilies – my mother’s favourite; flowers that would have been perfect for her grave.
    But Ben wasn’t fooled by any of this. For the first day he didn’t feed, just lay there watching me, an unhappy frown creasing his dry, scaly brow, disapproving even then, as though he knew the numb, dumb shock I was going through was as much to do with him as the experience he had put me through, like he was already aware he couldn’t count on me. He had an air of resignation about him, acknowledging me as his biological mother and also, his certainty that I would eventually let