duvet, the skin so pale you would not believe there was blood pumping through the veins. Gently I touch it and it feels as soft as melting butter.
After Sam went out, Bells and I tidied her room and put the snowy owl that Mum made for her on the bedside table. Bells loves owls. Mum made me a cheetah. His name is Charlie. Bells carefully placed her inhaler on the bedside table, along with her small photograph album that she has covered with David Beckham stickers. Mum told me she takes her album everywhere when she’s away from home, it’s like her comfort blanket. I pick it up and quietly leaf through the pages. By each photograph, inscribed on a small white sticker, is a precise date, time, location and description of the person photographed. There’s a picture of Mum in her studio, her hands caked in clay, smiling right into the camera; there’s a terrible picture of Dad with red eyes reading the newspaper; there’s a picture of the water meadows where we used to walk as children. My parents live in St Cross, Winchester. There’s a picture of a man wearing a purple tracksuit and football sweatshirt, holding a parrot. He has an identity card around his neck. ‘Ted, 1990, St David’s, in the garden, summertime.’
Bells opens her eyes and looks straight into me. I panic, thinking I shouldn’t be here, but then she shuts them again. I wonder what she dreams about when she goes to bed at night. When she was little she used to have nightmares so we had to keep a light on in her room. It was a little pink light in the shape of a house. Dad said Bells was terrified of the dark as a result of all the surgery she had to go through as a baby and young child. She developed a phobia about anaesthetics and would scream before each injection. She didn’t know what anaesthesia was, but she knew exactly what it meant. Blackness. Dad was good at talking to me and explaining. He was naturally gentle. In the end it was Emma’s sister, Natalie, who came up with a solution called ‘The Black Box’. We had to cut off a piece of Bells’s hair – it had to be something physical rather than an item of clothing. We put the strand of hair in a box and the alternative practitioner did a kind of absent healing. Mum and Dad thought we were mad but realized there was little to lose. Besides, we were all going insane from lack of sleep. I can still remember Natalie asking me to kiss the box. ‘Gives it good vibes,’ she claimed. After a few days Bells’s howling at night stopped. It was like magic.
I stand up, the stillness of the room contrasting strongly with the chaos earlier in the evening. As I’m about to leave the room I hear her muffled voice.
‘Nothing around me?’ she says groggily.
‘Nothing around you,’ I whisper back, just as Mum used to reply when she was a child.
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
CHAPTER NINE
1989
I climb the three steps into Mum’s studio. Her classical music is on in the background, just as it always is. Mum’s studio is like a zoo with the parrots, a pair of cockatoos, a zebra, a giraffe, a tiger, a lioness and a few monkeys perched on shelves, some half-finished, some that Mum calls ‘rejects’ because they slope too far to the right or left. Mum’s a sculptor. Her last project was a camel on bended knee. A friend of hers went to the Sahara Desert and fell in love with the camel she rode and asked Mum to do a sculpture for her from a photograph. She has an entire pin-board full of postcards and letters from happy customers who have commissioned monkeys or fish or whatever.
Mum’s long table in the middle of the room is covered with jam jars filled with brushes and open paint tubes. The room has that familiar smell of white spirit, clay, chalk and dust. ‘How are you, darling?’ she asks, her neck craned over her work. Her auburn hair is tied back in a navy and white dotted scarf and she’s wearing large silver hoop earrings that make her look like a gypsy.
I realize the only
After Sam went out, Bells and I tidied her room and put the snowy owl that Mum made for her on the bedside table. Bells loves owls. Mum made me a cheetah. His name is Charlie. Bells carefully placed her inhaler on the bedside table, along with her small photograph album that she has covered with David Beckham stickers. Mum told me she takes her album everywhere when she’s away from home, it’s like her comfort blanket. I pick it up and quietly leaf through the pages. By each photograph, inscribed on a small white sticker, is a precise date, time, location and description of the person photographed. There’s a picture of Mum in her studio, her hands caked in clay, smiling right into the camera; there’s a terrible picture of Dad with red eyes reading the newspaper; there’s a picture of the water meadows where we used to walk as children. My parents live in St Cross, Winchester. There’s a picture of a man wearing a purple tracksuit and football sweatshirt, holding a parrot. He has an identity card around his neck. ‘Ted, 1990, St David’s, in the garden, summertime.’
Bells opens her eyes and looks straight into me. I panic, thinking I shouldn’t be here, but then she shuts them again. I wonder what she dreams about when she goes to bed at night. When she was little she used to have nightmares so we had to keep a light on in her room. It was a little pink light in the shape of a house. Dad said Bells was terrified of the dark as a result of all the surgery she had to go through as a baby and young child. She developed a phobia about anaesthetics and would scream before each injection. She didn’t know what anaesthesia was, but she knew exactly what it meant. Blackness. Dad was good at talking to me and explaining. He was naturally gentle. In the end it was Emma’s sister, Natalie, who came up with a solution called ‘The Black Box’. We had to cut off a piece of Bells’s hair – it had to be something physical rather than an item of clothing. We put the strand of hair in a box and the alternative practitioner did a kind of absent healing. Mum and Dad thought we were mad but realized there was little to lose. Besides, we were all going insane from lack of sleep. I can still remember Natalie asking me to kiss the box. ‘Gives it good vibes,’ she claimed. After a few days Bells’s howling at night stopped. It was like magic.
I stand up, the stillness of the room contrasting strongly with the chaos earlier in the evening. As I’m about to leave the room I hear her muffled voice.
‘Nothing around me?’ she says groggily.
‘Nothing around you,’ I whisper back, just as Mum used to reply when she was a child.
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
CHAPTER NINE
1989
I climb the three steps into Mum’s studio. Her classical music is on in the background, just as it always is. Mum’s studio is like a zoo with the parrots, a pair of cockatoos, a zebra, a giraffe, a tiger, a lioness and a few monkeys perched on shelves, some half-finished, some that Mum calls ‘rejects’ because they slope too far to the right or left. Mum’s a sculptor. Her last project was a camel on bended knee. A friend of hers went to the Sahara Desert and fell in love with the camel she rode and asked Mum to do a sculpture for her from a photograph. She has an entire pin-board full of postcards and letters from happy customers who have commissioned monkeys or fish or whatever.
Mum’s long table in the middle of the room is covered with jam jars filled with brushes and open paint tubes. The room has that familiar smell of white spirit, clay, chalk and dust. ‘How are you, darling?’ she asks, her neck craned over her work. Her auburn hair is tied back in a navy and white dotted scarf and she’s wearing large silver hoop earrings that make her look like a gypsy.
I realize the only
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