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the fun she’d had, taking care to recount them, always, in my presence.
    I had sulked for six months, had saved every bit of my pocket money, had lost quite a lot of weight as I was not eating any snacks, and earned enough for the trip.
    ‘See, we can afford it,’ I had yelled, shoving the money at Mum, but by then it was too late.
    Tears had oozed out of her eyes and dropped down her cheeks, her face frozen, a study in hopelessness. And I had stormed off and sobbed in our not-so-private shared bedroom, not bothering to smother my sniffles.
    The same thing happened when the whole class went to France for a week – the whole class, that is, with the exception of me. That time I did not even bother to ask Mum. My classmates came back with tales of the wonders they had seen, the fun they had experienced, and I pretended I didn’t mind, that I had had a brilliant time monitoring the Reception kids the whole week.
    Somehow, now that I’ve let one memory in, more clamour for attention. I remember the time the head teacher of the school before this one asked to see Mum. When I had relayed the message to her, she had been shocked, terrified.
    ‘Come on, Mum, it’s nothing bad. I’m a good girl,’ I had said. ‘Mum, normally it is the other way round; I should be the one worrying, not you,’ I had laughed.
    We went together, she changing her outfit ten times, finally wearing a sari too grand for school. I knew people would tease me when they saw her decked out in a sequinned sparkly creation as if she was going to a wedding, but I hadn’t cared. I had felt proud walking up to school with my mum, showing her the lab, the gym, the music hut. She had been too panicked to see properly, wringing her sari continually, but her eyes had widened and she had said that it was all very grand. I put down her panic to the fact that she hardly ever interacted with anyone outside of the restaurants where she worked.
    On that particular occasion, the head teacher had called her in to praise me, to tell Mum that I would be getting a special prize for my writing. Once she got the hang of his speech, the anxious expression had lifted from her face, the creased lines had ironed out, and she had beamed. Her whole face had transformed and even the headmaster had been gratified when she held his hand and said, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ over and over again.
    ‘It’s not me,’ he had said. ‘It’s all your daughter’s hard work,’ winking at me.
    Mum had been so proud of me that day. She had wiped her eyes with the pallu of her best sari and skipped out of school, her face glowing.
    I can see now why she only used to go shopping late at night and was always looking over her shoulder when we were out together. I can see why she never went to the doctor, even when she was desperately ill that one time, preferring to self-medicate, picking something from the pharmacy at Asda. She always said she was shy because of her accent and that she never understood what the doctors were saying; they spoke too fast for her. It occurs to me now that her behaviour was strange, but then I never knew any different. I did not have friends to compare it with. It was what defined my mother, who she was.
    ‘If you worked at Tesco instead of an Indian restaurant, if you mixed more, you would understand their accent,’ I had said, mock exasperated.
    ‘I don’t need to mix; I have you,’ she had said, cupping my face fondly, planting a kiss on my nose.
    ‘But what about after I go away to uni, Mum?’
    ‘ Then I will mix,’ she had said.
    And now, she is gone.
    Don’t think about it. Don’t.
    I push these thoughts away and concentrate on Lily. I wish I was with her, snuggling on her worn sofa, she at one end, me at the other, basking in the soft pink glow of friendship, the heating cranked up to high, the stuffy amorphous cloud of blue-grey air, smelling of Glade and beef casserole, punctured every once in a while by our shared confidences and our