To Be Someone by Louise Voss Page B

much, so I gave up and stared at my shoes. They felt like part of my body, as if I had shoes instead of feet—actually, they looked similar to my legs: sturdy, scratched, and reddish-brown with mottled white patches. Like my cardigan and myself, my shoes were also cold.
    Finally, eventually, I heard my mother tread heavily downstairs in her fluffy mules.
    “Mummy!” I cried, running out to meet her and trying to leap into her arms as she stepped off the bottom stair. But her arms stayed by her sides, and she didn’t even try to catch me. She was wearing her quilted nylon dressing gown, a garment so shiny that I slipped right down her, landing painfully hard on her foot.
    “Ow! Goodness, Helena, must you be so boisterous? You’re far too big and heavy for me to carry you these days! Have you had breakfast?”
    She opened the front door to take the milk bottles off the step, and a flurry of snow whirled into the hallway, making everything even colder, as if the Ice Queen herself had driven the milk float that morning.
    I squeaked and ran into the kitchen. “Don’t let it in! Don’t let it in!”
    Mum followed me, limping slightly, and put the milk bottles on the kitchen counter.
    “I asked you a question, dear. Have you had breakfast or not? ”
    I nodded, still dancing around her as if my surfeit of energy could help boost her lack of it.
    “And look, Mummy, I got dressed all by myself, too, shoes and everything.”
    “So I noticed,” she said, rubbing her toe. “You’re a good girl, really. I’m sorry Mummy’s so tired this morning.”
    I watched as she stuck the spout of the kettle under the cold tap, filled it up, plonked it on the stove, struck a match, and lit the gas ring. She shivered as the blue flames licked around the kettle’s sides, and when she turned around to get a bowl out of the cupboard, her face looked like another square of her dressing gown—taut, shiny, and puffy.
    Fattypuff , I thought, making a mental note to ask Sam if she agreed with my diagnosis. We had discussed the strange fluctuations in my mother’s girth, and referred to the two extremes as either Fattypuff or Thinifer. I liked Mummy best when she was neither, when she was just in the middle. Then she let me pretend she was my pony, or made biscuits with me, or showed me how to glue strips of paper together into multicolored chains. Her makeup stayed on all day, and she was happy.
    “Will you help me make a snowman later, Mummy? ”
    We weren’t into an advanced Fattypuff condition yet, so I was reasonably hopeful of an affirmative answer. But it was not to be.
    “Why don’t you wait till Sam comes over? I’m sure she’d like to build a snowman with you.”
    “What about Dad? Will he help us? ”
    Mum pressed in the silver foil top of one of the milk bottles with her thumb and tried to pour the milk into the flowery milk jug. Nothing happened.
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Mum said, much more crossly than I thought necessary. “The wretched milk’s frozen!”
    I heard the sound of the front door opening and then closing again before I had time to run into the hall.
    “Where’s Daddy gone?” I asked, trying not to think of my father being swallowed up by the snow.
    Mum sighed and sat down, as if the milk and I were in some kind of conspiracy against her.
    “Nowhere, dear. He just popped down to the shops to pick something up for me from the chemist, that’s all. So about this snowman: I’ll get you a carrot for his nose if you go and fetch two pieces of coal from the coal scuttle for his eyes. How about that?”
    It would have to do. I hoped Sam knew how to construct men out of snow, because I had not the first idea. On cue, there was a scuffling outside the back door, and a timid knock.
    I brightened. Mum unbolted the door and admitted a chilly Sam, making her stand on the mat and stamp the snow off her little blue wellies first, before allowing her in properly.
    Sam looked like a stuffed toy animal, with