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rings.
    ‘There we go,’ I say, bending to kiss the top of Daisy’s head.
    She wraps herself around me.
    ‘Come on, sweetheart.’
    I try to prise her fingers away from my hand, but they stick like pieces of Elastoplast.
    ‘Mum, I can’t do this,’ she says. ‘Don’t make me.’
    I cannot disentangle her from me. I know this is ridiculous, but I can’t.
    People are looking at us with unconcealed curiosity. There are all these warnings in my head, slogans from the war between parents and children. They do try it on…Give them an inch…And I hear Gina at her most dogmatic, pronouncing on the pitfalls of modern parenting: You don’t want to go the brown rice and sandals route, you’ve got to show them who’s boss…
    ‘Sweetheart, you’ll be fine when you get into class.’
    She is crying openly now, shivering with it. She doesn’t even seem to hear me.
    ‘Come on, let’s go in together.’
    I try to move towards the gate, but the whole weight of her body is pressed against me.
    ‘I can’t, Mum,’ she says again.
    Fergal passes, coming out. He looks at me and nods but doesn’t smile, recognising my difficulty. Embarrassment washes hotly across my skin.
    Something gives way inside me.
    ‘OK. We’ll go home,’ I tell her.
    I bend and hug her, burying my face in the mango smell of her hair. Immediately she stops crying, though she’s shivering still. I have a sudden doubt: if only I’d pushed a little harder, I could have got her into class. I feel a pang for the exhibition, for the cat with the high-heeled shoe and the tunnels made of hair. Now I will never see them. But it’s done, we can’t go back. The front of my new black denim coat is damp where she’s been crying against me.

CHAPTER 4
    I wake in the night and immediately all the sleepiness falls from me. I hear the night sounds, the clock at St Agatha’s emptily striking three, a siren, the staccato bark of a fox as he ranges along the backs of the houses. Beside me, Richard snores softly.
    There in the cold darkness, my mind is clear, free of the day’s clutter, like a quiet pool. I’m alert, taut: I could run with the fox for miles. In that clarity, I start to add up all the food that Daisy has eaten for the last few days. Yesterday: a packet of crisps and about three spoonfuls of rice with gravy at tea-time. The day before yesterday: twowater biscuits and half a packet of crisps. The day before that, I can’t quite remember: perhaps it was a piece of apple and half a chocolate crispy cake from a whole batch I made.
    I’ve tried so hard to tempt her, cooked all her favourite things, offered them to her with that warm abundant feeling that fills you when you make good food for your children. Tomato soup from fresh tomatoes, ripe to the point of sweetness, with fennel and herbs for their green flavour, just a few so there wouldn’t be lots of leafy bits, and a swirl of cream on top. Fried chicken and noodles, her favourite, and a sponge cake with a lavish filling of strawberry conserve. Daisy helped me, sieving the icing sugar on top, making an intricate pattern of crescents she said she couldn’t get right, postponing the moment of eating; then, when I cut her a slice, she crumbled it up and left it. Chocolate crispy cakes, with a slab of organic Green and Black’s I found in the delicatessen. I tasted it when I’d melted it: it was velvet on my tongue, its scented richness making me sneeze. Normally Daisy would come and scrape the bowl, greedy and bright-eyed as some small animal, eagerly licking the dark congealing sweetness from the spoon, but she said she wouldn’t bother, she needed to finish her drawing. When the cakes were done, still warm, sticky, I put one on a plate for her. She took a bite and left it.
    ‘Sweetheart, don’t you like it? Perhaps I used the wrong chocolate.’
    ‘It’s fine, Mum,’ she said. ‘Really. I’ll have it later.’
    When Sinead came in from school, the house still smelt seductively of