The Things We Thought We Knew

My spine rolls forward like a sapling snapped in the wind. Amma interprets this as a sign of awe.

‘It is not a problem!’ she says, waving her hand in the air. ‘Anything for my darling Ravine!’

I made it clear last week: no balloons, no cake, no party. But somehow Amma’s brain has churned my words into all the balloons she can blow up, the biggest cake she can bake and as many party items as she can fill the room with.

Amma begins lighting the candles. Because there are so many this takes a good two minutes. By the time she’s on the fourth match my face is clammy; the throbbing in my limbs is making my vision woozy. I suck in a huge breath, ready to blow the whole monstrosity to another building, but as soon as the last candle is lit Amma begins slapping her thigh, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me in Bengali.

Amma’s been singing Bengali to me since I was in the womb, trying to trick me into learning the language. When I was a toddler she translated every nursery rhyme and changed all the animals, but ‘Baa Baa, Kala Chaagal’ doesn’t have quite the same ring. At bedtime she sang me folk songs about boats and paddy fields until I couldn’t get to sleep without them. I rebelled against her sing-song brainwashing by blocking out the meaning of all Bengali words. I can now chant the entire national anthem of Bangladesh without any idea of what I’m singing. The only Bengali I actually use is ‘amma’, meaning ‘mother’.

With my cheeks puffed out and afraid that either I’ll pass out or Amma’s sari will catch fire, I blow out the candles. She stops mid-verse and looks down at the cake.

‘Of course you made a wish?’ she asks.

Spirals of smoke circle my body. I close my eyes and clear my throat.

‘I wish for no more celebrations.’

I look up eagerly. Amma frowns, shaking her head as she pulls out a pillbox from the waist of her sari petticoat and places it on the bedside table.

‘If you say it out loud, it will not come true,’ she says. ‘Everybody knows this, Ravine.’

And, of course, she is right.

Within half an hour a crowd of neighbours floods into my room. Some of them I know (Sandy Burke and her twins), some of them I recognize (Mrs Patterson and her famously large breasts) and some of them I’ve never seen in my life. The ones I know say hello, the ones I recognize congratulate me with forced grins that look painful. The ones I’ve never seen in my life stand gawping at my statue of Shiva, the pile of unread books on the floor and the out-of-date CD collection by the stereo. I hope they won’t notice the museum timeline across the wall or the My Little Pony curtains, but these are the things they stare at most. I wait for Amma to click her tongue in that disapproving way of hers and make them stop. Instead, she wiggles through the crowd, placing her hands on top of each guest’s hand, thanking them with little curtsies worthy of a maharaja.

I can see what she’s done. Amma, cunning woman that she is, has scurried to every flat in Westhill Estate, knocking on each door and tempting residents with the promise of free cake. She’s given them samples, tiny pre-cut cubes that are just enough to set their mouths watering. Then, as she dashed away, she’s cried out, ‘No more until the party. Make sure you are there!’

I watch as Amma makes her way to the side of my bed. I open my mouth, but before I can say a word she’s spun around to face her new-formed army. She has a crazed-dictator smile as she raises her hands, clapping twice, as though doing the flamenco. Our guests lift their eyes from Bombay mix, small talk is sliced mid-sentence and Stevie Wonder is turned down in the background. The bed sinks as Sandy Burke sits on the end and works her way through a box of fun-size chocolate bars. She used to be skeleton thin, the bones of her hips jutting out from beneath her jeans like tent poles, her afro sitting like candyfloss on top of a stick. The image of Death tattooed on the side of her neck looked far healthier than she did. But now she has smooth contours of flesh on her face and neck. Her arms aren’t matchsticks any more but round and shapely.

When she tilts the box towards me I shake my head.

‘It is so good to see you all!’ Amma says (as though it was an accident, as though she hasn’t planned the whole thing).

She places her hand on my shoulder. It’s my bad shoulder so she touches it gently.

‘Today, my darling Ravine is eighteen years old.’

I cringe.

‘This is important because it is the beginning of her life as an adult.’

I cringe again.

‘Also, it is important because it is the beginning of her life outside this flat. Right, shona?’

I don’t have time to cringe because she’s looking down at me with round, dark eyes that could compete with a puppy dog’s. They make you do things, those eyes; make you give promises. They even make you believe you can keep them.

There’s a pause as everyone waits for me to speak. My muscles tense like tightropes. I lick my lips.

‘That’s right,’ I say.

Amma pats me on the head to show this is the correct answer. She clasps her hands together.

‘Now, time for cake!’

The crowd cheers as she cuts the cake into squares. From the corner of the room I catch Sandy Burke’s twins staring at me. Their identical-shaped heads are tilted at identical angles, ripples of confusion etched across their foreheads and black waves of hair hanging at the sides of their faces. They are only eleven years old yet their expressions make them look like scientists trying to decide if they’ve discovered a new virus. I clutch the edge of the duvet, listening to Stevie Wonder’s lyrics, reading the words across the banners, feeling my room fill up with smiley faces.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

HAPPY!! HAPPY!! HAPPY!! …

‘I’m going to sleep now!’

The words shoot out from my throat like bullets. I sink my fingers into the covers, tugging so hard that Sandy Burke jolts up from her seat. Amma looks at me, bindi raised high on her forehead.

‘But shona, it is ten-thirty in the morning.’

I shuffle down flat. ‘Thanks for coming!’

The room falls silent. It’s only when I begin to make snoring noises that everyone moves. They collect their pieces of cake and go down to the living room. As the last guest leaves, my body sighs. When I look over at Shiva and the My Little Ponies on the curtains, I see them sighing too.

Amma begins searching the room for painkillers before placing a bottle carefully on the bedside table.

‘Happy birthday, Ravine,’ she says and plants a wet kiss on my earlobe.

I keep one eye open as she leaves a piece of cake next to the bottle, watching her as she collects the rest of the food on a tray before sneaking out of the room.

I curl my knees to my chest. As the party continues downstairs I stay like this, pickling in the vinegar of my misery.

Some people have a deathbed. I have a lifebed.

It’s like when you have a cold. Not a tickly er-herm, er-herm cold that you down a couple of painkillers for and recover from in forty-eight hours. No. This is like an All-consuming Cold. Bleary vision, clunky limbs, the feeling of your brain oozing out of your nostrils and your muscles being jumped on by panda bears.

You drag yourself to school or work or wherever you need to be that day. You’re slightly productive for a few hours before the school bell rings or the clock strikes five and you get on the bus or in the car and drag yourself home. And that’s when it happens. The slam of the door. The thump of your coat on the hallway floor. Heavy footsteps up the stairs.

Bed.

It’s safe in bed. It’s warm in bed. No one’s asking you what date it is or how to solve an algorithm in bed. You sink into the mattress. You rest your head on your memory-foam pillow. Every part of you sighs – even your eyeballs and intestines. In a far-off country the doorbell rings but you don’t hear it because you’ve already set sail. In the realm of the All-consuming Cold, this is the closest you’ll feel to bliss.

Now imagine this again. Your cold is not a cold but chronic pain syndrome. A condition that leaves the majority of your body in constant pain, the type of pain you’d feel if killer sharks were biting through your muscles. Imagine sinking into your bed every day for nearly eleven years. You wake up. You go to the toilet. You collapse back in bed and sail off. Except you don’t sail anywhere because some bastard has moored you to a pole. You float in your sea of pain, hoping someone will come and hack the rope to pieces and set you free. They never do.

So yes, I have a lifebed. It probably sounds like a deathbed but it isn’t. I spend my life in bed, that’s why it’s my lifebed.

I lie coiled up, muscles throbbing, trying not to look at the photos on the wall or the piece of cake Amma has left me. Downstairs I can hear the babble of conversation and, every few minutes, the squeal of party blowers followed by shrieks of laughter. As time ticks on, the shrieks peter out. Guests say their goodbyes until the only noise left is the hiss of citrus breeze being sprayed along the hallway. When the hissing stops, Amma appears at my door with an armful of presents.

‘Didn’t it go well?’ she says, shrugging the load onto my bed. She drops into her seat, a grin plastered across her face. ‘In fact, I’d say it went swimmingly.’

The presents topple to the side of my legs as I wedge the pillows behind my back. I push the hair off my face.

‘I didn’t want a party,’ I say.

Amma flaps her hand at me. ‘You’re welcome.’

I sigh, looking at the repeat-print wallpaper beside me. The neck of each bird is arched back, wings cocked in the air as if ready to escape. I hated those birds when Amma covered the living room with them and hated them even more when she used the leftover rolls for my room. The sharp beaks and beady eyes give me nightmares but when I told Amma she chuckled as though I’d told her a cute joke.

‘Open your presents, darling,’ Amma says.

I carry on looking at the birds.

‘Ravine.’

When Amma uses a certain voice it’s best to do what she says.

I don’t look up as I rip each present open: a flowery bracelet I have no use for, some glitzed-up slippers to brighten my visits to the bathroom, and a fabric-covered journal with jewel-encrusted pen.

I roll the pen between my fingers, feeling the sting of frayed nerves in my wrist. Sometimes the pain is hard and throbbing like a repeated punch, other times quick and sharp. As the light sparks against the jewels on the pen, the pain in my wrist sparks too.

‘What am I supposed to write about?’ I ask.

Amma nods as though this is an excellent question.

‘Your pain,’ she says. ‘There are studies that show if you write about your physical pain it helps you heal your mental pain.’

I curl my top lip. ‘That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,’ I say.

‘Also,’ Amma continues, ‘it will be good preparation for when you leave the flat. You will be able to record your progress.’

She taps the diary then stands up, clearing the wrapping paper from my bed as she begins humming. The pain is getting worse; the electric shocks in my wrist flash so furiously that my muscles begin to spasm. I drop the pen, trying to breathe through the pain the way my physiotherapist has taught me.

Remember to breathe, he said. People with chronic pain tense all their muscles and forget to relax.

I relax. The spasms ease. But there is still a trembling in my fingers, the feeling of electricity surging through my nerves.

‘Amma,’ I say, ‘this talk of me leaving the flat …’

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she says.

She carries on collecting.

I shake my head. ‘It hasn’t happened yet.’

Amma stands straight, holding the balled-up paper to her chest as though it’s a fat, multi-coloured baby. ‘But of course it will happen. You promised me,’ she says.

She holds my gaze for a moment before taking the paper and stuffing it into the bin. I hear the crackle of layers crushing into each other.

‘Amma,’ I say. ‘The pain …’

When she turns to look at me I can see her eyes flickering with new plans.

‘We will take it slowly. Walking down and up the stairs a few steps at a time. Sitting on the balcony so you get used to the air.’

‘Why would I need to—’

‘Then we will walk to the park. Feed the ducks.’

‘I don’t like d—’

‘Soon you will be able to go out on your own. See your friends. It is like the doctor says: a little exercise and a healthy social life will lift your mood.’

The birds begin squawking, flapping their wings as the walls collapse around me. The full force of a blazing sun hits my body, wind blowing leaves across my face before sucking me up into a hurricane that spins me to the sky.

I roll my eyes. ‘My mood is just fine,’ I say.

Amma lists the symptoms that indicate it isn’t.

She pushes her chin deep into her neck.

‘We all know about the last one, yes?’

I shuffle down flat on my back. Getting me to ‘talk about my feelings’ is Amma’s number-one mission. She tried to get me to talk to a doctor and she tried to get me to talk to a counsellor. She tried to get me to talk in a support group and even tried to get me to talk to her. But the doctor was too clinical, the counsellor too soft, the support group made me want to jump out of the window. While speaking to Amma feels like speaking to an alien race.

The problem is simple. Nobody can understand my life because nobody else has lived it.

Except, maybe, for you.

‘Make sure you write something in your Pain Diary tonight,’ Amma says now.

Pain Diary. Just the name of it makes my stomach coil. I exhale slowly, waiting for my body to inhale naturally. This is a trick the physiotherapist showed me, a way of distracting my brain from the pain. When she speaks again Amma’s voice is soft, hopeful.

‘Will you at least try?’

My chest inflates. I breathe out.

‘Sure,’ I say.

I wait until I hear her feet going down the stairs then sit back up, gulp down the painkillers and gaze at the wall opposite. It still has the timeline of my life across it. The baby pictures, the teenage ones and there, smack in the middle, the picture of us on my seventh birthday. It used to be my favourite photo. Before you disappeared I kept it on my bedside table in a frame I’d made out of cereal-box cardboard and sweet wrappers. The wrappers always fell off so I had to eat more chocolates whenever I wanted to fix it.

In the photo our faces are pressed cheek to cheek as we sit in those absurd party dresses we wore whenever we could get away with it. Amma bought them in the January sales: a pair of peach-coloured garments covered with ribbons, sparkles and so many ruffles we looked as if we were made out of whipped cream. You have your tanned arms wrapped around my brown neck, and that elastic smile that stretched your face out like a rugby ball. The curly mop of your hair is flattened against my cheek as I smile my own gap-toothed grin towards the camera. As I look at the photo I remember how, after it was taken, the ribbons on our dresses were so tangled we hobbled around for the rest of the afternoon pretending we were conjoined twins.

The memory comes like an extra coin in the pocket: it has always been there but finding it again is a happy surprise. I lie on my back, rummaging through my mind for more memories. I look up at the cracked ceiling, images of our life flickering across it: you climbing down trees with twigs in your hair, us sliding down the railings to the bottom of the estate. I see flashing shots of nineties memorabilia: tie-dyed T-shirts, a Jagged Little Pill CD, the Commodore 64 your brother owned when really he wanted a Sega Mega Drive. Then there’s the scene of when your mother decided to leave. Us sitting on the rug in front of your television, pretending to play chess (though neither of us knew how), Jonathan in the back, sulking over something or other, and your mother at the dining-room table with her head in her hands.

I sense the weight of the diary on my lap. It feels as heavy as the bricks of the walls around me. My eyes begin to sting and my throat tightens with a sharp twist as I lift my hand to hurl the book across the room.

But something, a small seed of thought, makes me stop. Streetlamps shine a honey glow, the blaze of car headlights zooms across the walls as the thought grows and blossoms. I pick up the jewel-encrusted pen from the bedside table and grip it tightly. Maybe I should write it down. All the things that happened to us the way I remember, as well as the life I have now. I could document it all and then maybe I would understand it. And you, Marianne, you would understand too.

When I have this thought, something amazing happens. You wouldn’t believe it.

I smile.

And that is just at the thought.

When the illness first came I tried not to remember anything. Memories are like stinging nettles. At first you don’t realize they’ve stung you and by the time you do, the needles are already buried under your skin, making you itch until all you can think about is ways to get rid of the sting. I tried to get rid of you, Marianne. I hid all our toys beneath my bed, removed all the pictures from their frames yet still, even when I try to forget, you’re there.

The first memory I have of you is all knickers and legs. You can’t have been more than six at the time but had somehow flipped yourself into a handstand against the wall of my flat and couldn’t get back down. The skirt of your dress was so long it covered not only the bottom half of your upside-down body but also your head. I remember the sight of your tanned legs against the cream of the wall, the tiny flower print on your frilly yellow knickers. Even then I was jealous of you because all my underwear was plain and white and bought from the local pound shop.

Memories are slippery. Although this image of you is clear in my mind, I can’t remember what you said as I helped flip you back up. Whether you were dizzy as the blood drained from your head, whether you tried to teach me the same trick and I point-blank refused. But I do remember thinking you were someone I wanted to be friends with, even when all I could see were your knickers and legs. I had no other friends on Westhill and you fitted the bill (i.e. you were my age, you were a girl).

Amma had been worried about me at the time because I hadn’t been mixing well at school. I had a habit of hiding from the other children, inventing my own games in quiet little corners and screaming at anyone who found me. At home I stayed superglued to Amma’s side, asking her never-ending questions as she did the housework. After I took an interest in you she regularly pushed me out of the flat, making me knock on your door, then, when you answered, telling me not to rush home. Amma decided we were best friends before either of us did.

At school we did every project together. There was the time we tried to research a tourist brochure of our local area but the only facts we found out were how the city was (roughly) in the middle of the country, had a cheese named after it and was once home to Daniel Lambert, the fattest man in England. It took us a while to come up with a slogan. At first we thought of Leicester: in the middle of everything, then became more ambitious with Leicester! Eat cheese! Get fat! Get famous! Eventually we decided to steal Rebecca Knight’s idea: Leicester – the heart of England. Rebecca Knight sat on the top table and was so clever she didn’t have to do partner work. She was a safe bet.

When it came to the actual content of the brochure we decided to narrow our focus to facts about Westhill Estate and, more specifically, the residents of Bosworth House and their pets. Most of those people have left now. The Pattersons still live on the fourth floor (one mother, three boys, two British bulldogs) and Sandy Burke and her twins live on the first (three cats), but other people like old Mrs Simmons across the hall (two budgies and a parakeet) have gone.

People move in and out of Bosworth House all the time. In your old flat next door, a Somali family are getting ready to move after – allegedly – winning the lottery. This was controversial because the Ahmed family are Muslim and the mother had been buying lottery tickets secretly at the corner shop, even though it’s against her religion to gamble. You should have heard the way they argued about it. I didn’t understand what they said but it sounded bitter. Their two boys slept in the room that used to be yours and, whenever their parents argued, hid there until it blew over. Through the walls, I’d hear them debating whether it was better to do a water-bomb attack from the third- or fourth-floor balcony (third had better range, fourth had better height). But just as I got drawn into the debate they began speaking in fast beats of Somali that washed straight over me.

I miss their voices. The sound filled the emptiness the way your voice did when you spoke to me at night. It was a blessing and a curse that your bed was pushed up against the same partition wall as mine. If you spoke loudly I could hear most of what you said, but if you lowered your voice it was like listening to a radio that keeps losing its signal. If it was past nine o’clock I’d tell you to shut up because I needed to sleep. I believed in sleep then because Amma fed me the lie that without enough of it not only would I stop growing but I would shrink. I was too small already and wouldn’t have been so rude if I wasn’t afraid of disappearing. Still, you never seemed to mind, carrying on with your jibber-jabber right through the night.

‘If you could have a superpower, what (mumble, mumble)? … I (mumble) invisible. I read about this man who (mumble, mumble) but there was a picture of him right there so (mumble, mumble). Or maybe (mumble) was invincible.’

I kept my mini dictionary in my robe pocket, and wanted to check what ‘invincible’ meant but was scared that, if I did, the lack of sleep would make me shrivel into a speck of dust. Eventually my fear of shrinking was outweighed by my need to know and I’d end up sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor, looking up all the unknown words you bombarded me with.

I was the queen of words back then. I’d constantly look up meanings in my mini dictionary, which you found funny and useful, and your messy-haired brother found plain irritating. He used to shove me in the shoulder when I used a word he didn’t understand (which was often), making sure you were looking the other way when he did it. Sometimes he’d snatch my mini dictionary and wave it over my head until I’d have to jump up and down like a Jack Russell to retrieve it. Jonathan always knew how to rattle me. It was his one and only gift in life.

I suppose you won’t remember much about Bosworth House, it’s been so long. You probably remember the size of it, looming high and wide as it sits on the side of the hill, but you’ll have forgotten the details. The bars they extended on the balconies so that people wouldn’t throw themselves (or each other) over the side. The narrow steps with a rank stink we only found out was piss when Jonathan told us in a well-what-else-would-it-be tone one day. The way the council comes and repaints the outside walls each and every year but still doesn’t send anyone to fix the stupid lifts. The view from the fourth floor where you can see down to the whole of Westhill Estate, white-painted blocks of flats snaking down to the main road like vertebrae. We used to sit up there on the fourth floor with our legs poking out from the gaps in the railings, swinging them in the breeze as we sucked orange-flavoured ice-lollies. We’d turn to each other and shout, ‘Open wide and say ahhrr!’ in our poshest doctor voices, then stick out tangerine tongues at each other before droning out the sound. We tried to see who could carry the note the longest. You always won.

No, when I think through the logic of it I don’t believe you’d remember any of it. I don’t blame you. You haven’t had ten years of lying in the same bed with nothing but the same memories running through your head. That’s all I’ve had, you see. That and Amma.

‘It’s my job to take care of you, shona,’ she tells me on my bad days. ‘I will never leave you, Ravine. You cannot be selfish when you’re a mother.’

When she says this, I don’t remind her about yours.

She was beautiful, your mum, or at least she had been in the photographs. She had a whole row of them lined up in silver frames on the dresser in your living room. Glossy shots of her young grinning face, ruffled blonde eighties hair, pink silky lipstick circling her mouth. When she was drunk she would tell us about when she was a beauty queen. We imagined her on stage in an evening gown, tiara perched on big pouffy hair as she rolled her hand in a royal wave. After she’d gone we found a picture under the bed of her sitting on her knees, skin tanned brown as horse hide, chin dipped down to her collarbone as her breasts lay exposed.

Your mother was always so happy in those photographs – even the nudey one. She hardly ever smiled when we were around and never at me. I had a habit of irritating her without meaning to. Every time I called her Mrs Dickerson she’d visibly flinch.

‘For heaven’s sake, just call me Elaine,’ she’d say.

I’d nod my head. ‘Yes, Mrs Dickerson.’

In fact, the only time I saw your mother use her photograph-smile was with your dad. Her eyes would light up, every tooth on display. Then, five minutes later she’d be throwing plates at his head. When she sat me, you and Jonathan down to explain he’d moved to live in ‘the castle’ in the middle of the city, we all believed her. It was only later that we found out this was HM Prison Leicester, which did in fact look like a giant castle, though wasn’t home to any lords or ladies. You never saw him again.

On the day that would change everything, the same day we were pretend-playing chess in your living room, Mrs Dickerson only began smiling after she’d opened the letter. It had been lying there on the pile she always banned you from looking at – white envelopes with official type, brown envelopes with red writing at the edges of their plastic windows. But this letter was different. It had a loose handwritten scrawl across it, and when your mother opened it she didn’t throw a mug against the wall like she did when she read the other letters, but sat upright in her seat. We were eight then and so used to her slump – lying across sofas, draped across table tops – that when she sat up straight we both looked up from the chessboard. Her pale-blue eyes were scanning the pages, dropping down to the bottom of a sheet before flicking quickly to the next. When she’d finished she simply sat, staring at the bundle of papers in her hands. Eventually she smiled. Not the same as the toothy smiles in the pictures, wide and exaggerated, but soft, slow and full of hope. It wasn’t long after that she got the vodka bottle from the kitchen and pulled us into a barn dance.

Jonathan watched from the corner of the room.

‘For shit’s sake!’ he said, as she began spinning us around.

She was whooping so loudly that she didn’t hear him.

‘Ding dong, the witch is dead!’ she sang, do-si-doeing our bodies across the carpet.

Your mother’s favourite film was The Wizard of Oz so we didn’t pay much attention to the words. Her steps were so quick we almost tumbled over until she suddenly stopped. She looked at the dresser before running over to it and opening all the doors. She was in such a rush that she didn’t notice how she’d upset her own pictures. The metal frames clinked against each other as she opened a small burgundy book with a gold emblem of a lion and unicorn stamped on the cover. As she examined the pages inside she didn’t notice how the photographs of her former beauty – the same ones she polished each Sunday and banned you from touching – had fallen flat on their faces.

We should have known then that something was wrong.

Signs of spring: fuzzy green buds sitting on spindly branches outside the window; birds perched on said branches, twittering like maniacs; Amma telling me to stop throwing objects at said window to get rid of said birds twittering like maniacs.

I’m not always great at spotting the signs. It’s easy to forget the month or day when you’re in a lifebed. There’s a 2010 calendar hanging on the back of my bedroom door, page turned to January, with a giant picture of kittens in a basket at the top, but Amma forgets to flip the month over because she never sees it. When she’s in my room, the door stays open and the calendar is hidden away. And then when she leaves, she closes the door behind her and the calendar remains unseen. This is like life: there are things we think we’ve tucked away but they’re still there, concealed from view.

Amma comes into my room with a tray of curried breakfast. She comes in three times a day, ambling down the hallway in her sari and socks with a tray of unsuitable food held tightly in her hands. Chapattis round and floury, steaming with heat from the pan. Soft curried potatoes, yellowed with turmeric and splattered with mustard seeds and coriander leaves, a whole green chilli angled on the side. There’s no use telling Amma that chilli isn’t suitable for breakfast. My mother has her own logic which bears no relation to the everyday logic the rest of us use.

Chapattis = breakfast

Rice = lunch and dinner

Curry = all the livelong day

‘This is the Bengali way,’ she tells me, knowing full well I don’t know any better. She could tell me swimming in a bicycle helmet is a national custom in Sylhet and I’d have no way of proving otherwise.

Along with the heartburn-inducing breakfast, Amma brings me a tumbler filled to the brim with mango juice. The tumbler is decorated with red cockerels; she got it free using cereal coupons when I was four years old. Heaven, for my mother, would be a discount store and a handful of coupons.

‘Good morning, my sweet eighteen-year-old!’ she says as she comes in.

I wipe the sleep from my eyes.

‘Morning, Amma.’

She settles the tray on my lap, places my pills in a line like soldiers preparing to march. As I shuffle up in the bed I hear the pills wobble, hard shells clinking against plastic. Amma nudges them back in line in that swift way of hers, putting things back in place before you even realize they’re out.

Amma sits by the window and watches me. The folds of her sari puff out as she waits for me to have my first mouthful. Once, years ago, I tried pushing the tray away and she near forced the food down my throat, holding my head by the back of the scalp and pushing hot potato to my sucked-in lips.

‘Good girl,’ she says as I take my first mouthful.

Good girl, as though I’m eight and not eighteen.

I take a sip of mango juice, waiting for Amma to detail her strategy for Getting Ravine Out of the Flat. Instead, she begins her ritual with the letters. Each and every day Amma leans back in her seat, pulls out the post from the waist of her sari petticoat and begins reading me junk mail.

No, not just junk mail. Sometimes she reads me the bills.

Amma thinks that if she tells me about a new restaurant opening five streets away, or the money I could save when calling friends (which I don’t have), I’ll somehow gain an interest in the Big World Outside. The world that, for the last few years, I’ve seen only through the squares of windows. Taxi windows taking me to hospital windows, then back to taxi windows that will drive me to the same infernal bedroom window that I look out of each day.

Sometimes Amma tells me about current affairs. Troops being killed in Afghanistan, conspiracy theories about the death of Michael Jackson. When Barack Obama was elected, Amma blubbered through the whole inauguration as though the President of the United States were in fact her long-lost son. She looked over at me, baffled when I couldn’t muster a tear.

‘It is so wonderful, is it not?’ she said.

I was too busy absorbing the fact that I hadn’t noticed a whole presidential election had been and gone to agree.

News is seducing; like any other kind of gossip I’m always tempted to listen in. I learnt the consequences a few years back when Amma read an article to me about the bunny murders in Ruhr Valley, Germany. The report left me so disturbed I had recurring nightmares of waking up in a room full of rabbit heads. But here’s what I’ve decided: I have no part in the world and the best thing is to keep it that way. I’m perfectly happy in the vacuum of my room where nothing ever changes. Good old Shiva watching over me from the dresser, My Little Ponies frolicking merrily on the folds of the curtains. Even the squawking birds on the wallpaper are some form of company, despite their evil eyes. Unfortunately, Amma doesn’t agree. She thinks I need to know about every disaster and tragedy that pops up on the news. There is now a ‘global financial crisis’, she tells me. People will lose jobs, families will be on the ‘breadline’, our entire broken country will become a no man’s land, with politicians feeding on the dead corpses of the poor and destitute (i.e. us).

‘A postcard!’ Amma says this morning.

I’m swallowing my pills as she says it and almost choke. When I look up at her, Amma has her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose with an oblong card held in front of her. Morning light filters through the curtains, making the postcard glow. I can see the picture of a tropical beach fringed with a luminous light as she frowns and squints, trying to decipher the words on the back. For a moment my heart holds on to its own beat, making my chest cave in, my stomach tighten.

‘“Dear Mrs Roy,”’ she says in her booming read-aloud voice. ‘“We are on the third day of our trip and are having the time of our lives! Here on Primrose Cruises not only do you get the pleasure of an all-inclusive holiday (meals included) but access to sports, bar and leisure facilities. Terms and conditions apply. Already we have been working out at the gym, drinking cocktails at the bar and pampering ourselves in the exclusive Thai spa. Why don’t you come join us by following our blog on www.primrose-cruises.blogspot.com. Wish you were here! Angela and Simon.”’

Amma continues to frown as she turns the card over in her hand. She peers at me over her glasses.

‘Who is this Angela and Simon?’

I take a deep breath. The pain is vibrating through my nerves, pulsing louder and louder.

‘It’s junk mail, Amma,’ I tell her, sliding my breakfast tray to the bedside table, feeling the cramping of muscles in my arm.

She sits up straight, as though I’ve told her a lie. She examines the postcard closely, pushing the print right up to her nose before running her finger across it. Her brows rise high, lips pouting.

‘The type is just like handwriting,’ she tells me.

I sigh in that way I do to stop myself from rolling my eyes. Amma hates the eye-rolling even more than the sighing and, even though I rarely show it, I love my mother. You know this and so does she, but sometimes I need to prove this to myself with these small acts of kindness.

‘The wonders of a modern age,’ I say, before rolling over and covering my shoulders with the duvet. The pain is throbbing now, a loud, angry pulse that pounds through the left side of my body. I wait to hear the shuffle of Amma’s sari as she rises to her feet.

‘We shall start our exercises later,’ she says. ‘I must give you time to digest your breakfast.’

‘How generous,’ I mumble as I concentrate on keeping my muscles relaxed.

I squeeze my eyes closed as nausea crashes through my stomach. I shudder.

‘I think we shall start with something small,’ she carries on. ‘Perhaps getting dressed.’

The bed begins to bob from side to side like a ship lost at sea.

‘I’m not getting dressed,’ I say.

‘Or walking outside.’

‘No, thanks.’

The waves grow bigger and my bed begins to rock violently.

I open my eyes to see Amma hovering by the side of my bed. I smile at her, hoping I can hide the screaming pain. The room blurs behind her and I close my eyes.

‘I will write a list of options,’ she says. Through the ringing in my ears I hear the dull clatter of the tray as she collects it and moves to the end of the room. After ten years, I’ve learnt how to hide my symptoms from Amma, to keep her from worrying, to keep her from sitting at my bedside and mopping my brow. Just as she gets to the door, Amma pauses. I crane my neck, seeing her fuzzy shape standing at the end of the bed. The room is still swaying.

‘So much like handwriting,’ she says.

I imagine Amma holding up the postcard, examining the text again while shaking her head. I don’t look to check in case she looks back and sees that I’d been fooled too, if only for a moment, and that in that moment, my heart missed a beat.

I hadn’t realized your mother had gone until the night I heard you crying. All Friday at school you’d seemed just fine. On the playing field you’d rolled out cartwheel after cartwheel, not caring that all the boys could see your luminous shorts flashing at them like an amber light. But when it came to the weekend I suppose the weight of her absence hit you. As I tucked myself into bed I didn’t hear your usual jabbering but a quiet sobbing leaking through the walls. I asked you what was wrong but you pretended not to hear. I knew that you were pretending because your whimpers came to a sudden stop. I imagined you burying your head beneath the duvet, trying not to breathe, stifling your sniffles in the springs of your mattress.

If I’d ever seen you cry before, it was because of injury not grief. You’d perform one of your ridiculous stunts, pretending to tightrope walk on a wall or racing Jonathan up a tree, and end up with jagged red scrapes down your knees and elbows. You never cried for long, holding on to the sting with one hand as you wiped away snot and tears with the other, hobbling to the nearest adult with hiccuping gulps.

‘I shall chop it off with a knife,’ Amma said to you once.

She performed a chopping action as she spoke, banging the edge of one hand against the other like a cleaver against a board. She then giggled in that ‘tee hee’ fashion you always found so hilarious. You spluttered with laughter while I stood frozen with the image of cleavers in my mind.

You won’t know this but the night I heard you crying, I crept down the stairs, out of the flat and to your front door. I’d like to say this was pure selflessness on my part, that the sound of your pain caused me so much worry that I couldn’t rest without coming to soothe you. That would be a lie and the last thing I want to do is to lie to you.

The truth is I came that night because I was so used to your prattling at bedtime I found it hard to fall asleep without it. As the silence soaked the walls, I stared blankly at the ceiling, thinking about how much my body would have shrunk by morning.

It was Jonathan who answered the door. He had on his thick-framed glasses that covered half his face and thunderstorm pyjamas with lightning bolts shooting out of grey clouds. I used to call him Jonathan-Weatherboy. He hated it, even though he loved the weather, randomly announcing make-believe forecasts that no one had asked for. He sat so close to the television – watching those weather reports, memorizing the language and imitating the gestures of his idols – that we were convinced he would one day fall through the screen. Once, he ordered us to paint him a map of the British Isles so he had something to practise his reports on. He got all flustered when he stuck it to the wall and found Scotland was ten times too big, looking like an infected head, bloated and lopsided upon the dwarf body of England. When we told him the cross in the middle was to mark our location (Leicester – the heart of England) he ripped the map in two.

‘What do you want?’ Jonathan asked that night.

‘Marianne,’ I said.