She was zonked out, in a bizarre position – curled up like a foetus with forehead pressed against the wall.

The duvet was shoved down to her feet. I could see dampness pooled around her incontinence pants.

That was hard to see.

I remembered how dutifully she would lift me on to a potty in the middle of the night.

I wet the bed right up until I was about ten, I think.

Sometimes, Mum wouldn’t come upstairs from the hotel bar in time, and I’d have already wet the bed. But she never shouted. She let it air out, moved my sleepy form to the dry area.

Over at Dad’s house, it was different. I reckon Dad thought being pissed off – pun intended – would make me learn to stop. If I woke up in the middle of the night in a puddle of urine, I kept it uncovered and curled my little body around it, sleepily praying that it be dry by morning.

If I slept right through and woke up wet, I’d frantically dab at the puddle with clothes, or put the duvet over and hope Dad wouldn’t fling it back to check.

He usually did. And he was always very angry about it.

But he didn’t know wetting the bed at my age was directly attributed to having being molested. He had no idea I had been molested.

Decades later, seeing my mother had moved herself from the wet patch triggered all sorts of sad memories. I remembered how cold her hands felt as she lifted my little body onto that potty, how she smelled of alcohol and perfume, how she gently put the duvet over me afterwards.

I grabbed a towel and laid it down over the patch, then gently pulled the duvet up to her chin. She stirred in her sleep, but did not wake.

I went to the sofa in the dining room, and fell into a nap.

At 9am I was jarred from a fitful sleep by my aunt and big brother J coming in to the house. T went to talk to my sleepy but chatty mother, and J rifled chaotically through the larder for cleaning supplies.

‘You alright?’ He nodded, passing with arms full of cloths and spray bottles.

It was so strange, suddenly knowing this man. Mum had successfully engineered it so I had no idea who my own brother was. It made me feel sick.

I stared into my coffee. If I thought about it too hard, I was going to get very angry at the weak, dying woman bound to that tiny bed in the living room. There was a lot of things I wanted to scream at her.

Why did you commit your life to protecting a paedophile?

Why did you manipulate me and D, and even T, into distancing ourselves from your own son, J?

What made you need to keep D and me away from T, when her husband was dying?

How dare you hurt your children and your sister?

When I was twenty years old, my younger brother D had a bit of a crash out.

He was angry that The Man Who Is Not My Father never saw punishment. There were various phone calls, between me and D and then D and mum and then mum and me. She was doing everything she could to stop D calling the police.

She called me and she said the most awful thing.

‘You know, when you were little, J was a bit…weird with you.’

Mum tried to plant the seed of an idea that it wasn’t The Man Who Is Not My Father who molested me, but her own son. My big brother.

I told T this in the kitchen now, while I sipped my coffee. She nodded. She already knew about that.

‘Around the time it must have happened,’ she said, holding a Mr Muscle poised in her hand, ‘your mum told me she found J in bed with you.’

Bile rose in my throat.

‘That didn’t happen,’ I said.

And it didn’t.

I was nonced when my younger brother and I didn’t have beds at mum’s place: we alternated between a piss-stained camp bed in mum’s bedroom and the other side of her mattress.

Even when J was living with us as children, I don’t remember him even hugging me. With ten years between us, we had zero in common and if anything I annoyed him.

‘Well, no.’, T said, ‘Of course J didn’t do that. And I said to [T’s late husband] what do you think about that? And he said just ignore it, it’s probably nothing. And I thought about it a lot but I never said anything.’

The Man Who Is Not My Father was a friend to T. Her husband used to go out to the pub with the guy.

You’d never, ever think that a friend could be a nonce. It’s the last thing you’d think, because it’s so horrifying.

It’s horrifying.

Mum wanted me to have spaghetti bolognaise and garlic bread with her for dinner.

‘I’ll send you some money,’ she said, pawing for her phone. I was surprised to get a notification of a couple of hundred pounds landing in my moth-filled account.

‘Er, Mum, I think you’ve sent me too much for spaghetti bolognaise and garlic bread.’

‘I’ve not.’

‘No, you have…’

‘I know what I’m doing, it’s for petrol too.’

She repeated the amount at me. She’d managed to navigate her banking app, but couldn’t write coherently or remember the time any more.

I was impressed and yes, I did accept the money. A dark part of me felt entitled to compensation for nearly 15 years of on and off therapy tackling her and her partner’s actions.

She was happy for me to pop to the shop now that she knew her sister was in the house. Between T and Alexa, she had enough people to shout at.

‘ALEXA,’ I heard her yell as I left, ‘TURN ON YORK…YOUR MIX RADIO.’

At the shop in the town square I stood in the alcohol aisle, a microwave bolognaise tucked under my arm.

It probably wasn’t a good idea to be drinking while looking after with a dying woman.

But this was winding up to be one of the worst times of my life. And during the worst times of my life previously, I’d not had a mother to turn to – I’d turned to alcohol instead.

I left the aisle, hands empty, and scanned the chocolates for mum’s requested Walnut Whips and After Eights. I found the latter, stared at the packet for a moment, then turned back on myself.

I grabbed the neck of a pinot grigio. Fuck it.

Back at the house, I dumped my shopping bag on her bedside table.

‘I couldn’t get either of those Deep Heat sprays you wanted. The pharmacy was closed.’

I braced myself for a kicking off, but she looked at me mildly.

‘Oh,’ she managed. ‘Bugger.’

‘I can drive to a big pharmacy at Monk’s Cross, that’s still open.’

‘No love, it’s fine.’

I got the impression she didn’t want me to leave the house. She didn’t want me to be gone again.

‘But I did find you some After Eights,’ I beamed, pulling out the box. She lit up. ‘And I got this cheese spread for you. It’s supposed to be really strong. Like the cheese you said came in barrels.’

‘Oh aye?’ She reached out. I handed the pot to her. Her outreached fingers missed it by about six inches.

‘Why aren’t you giving me it?’

‘I am, Mum…’

I guided it in to her palms. She peered at the label.

‘Well, we can give it a go, can’t we?’

I made her some toast.

‘Oh my god,’ She said, chewing on one of the soft toast fingers. ‘This spread is amazing.’

‘Is it?’ I laughed. I felt oddly proud to have done something right for a change.

‘Oh, it’s gorgeous. What brand is it?’

I had to fetch her the tub again because she didn’t believe I’d read the brand name right. Seriously Strong cheese spread. She rolled the tub in her fingers while the other hand tried to hold the toast.

‘This is dead good,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to put some on the next Asda shop.’

‘I’ll let T know,’

Poor T was the only one mum trusted to do the online Asda shop. It was a nightmare of patience.

Unlucky for me though, mum wanted to check her husband’s direct debits and T was too busy cleaning upstairs.

‘Go look in my handbag. There’s a yellow book. It’s got the passwords in it. And get my tablet.’

Oh God.

I was touched and…confused?...to see the little yellow book was my homework diary from when I was thirteen; one I’d thought I’d lost, had replaced by school, and then given to Mum.

When I handed it over she fumbled through the pages with shaking fingers.

‘Give me a minute.’

I sat with the tablet on my lap, open on the bank login page.

She leafed through her little yellow book. And she leafed. And leafed.

‘You have to give me a minute,’ she said, after about ten. She actually woke me from a half-snooze by saying that.

Another ten minutes.

‘Do you need me to find it?’

‘No!’ she snapped. ‘Just wait.’

I waited. Upstairs, J and T shared a joke. I could smell window cleaner.

I opened up Wikipedia and found some rabbit hole to go down. Did you know Ebola is a prion disease? Prion diseases are horrifying. There’s one that keeps you alive for ages without sleep for even a minute.

‘Right.’ She woke me from my reverie. ‘The password is,’

‘Hang on!’

‘I thought you were ready!’ She snapped, hands falling to her legs in genuine exasperation.

What followed was nearly twenty minutes of her reading out a username character by character, followed by password character by character. Every time, some details were wrong. Every time, it was my fault the login wasn’t working.

Eventually, I moved the footstool back so I could read the usernames and passwords over her shoulder. She’d been reading them wrong – missing just one character, sometimes multiples.

‘Oh, it worked!’ I exclaimed. ‘I must have forgotten to refresh the page!’

She looked at me with genuine disdain.

‘For someone with a Cambridge degree, you’re quite stupid aren’t you.’

I bit my lip.

‘Right,’ she said eventually, ‘I need you to log in to my phone account now.’

I considered punting myself into the nearby river.

‘So who’s here now?’ Mum demanded.

‘T, and your son J. They’re cleaning.’

‘J’s here?’ She exclaimed, face lighting up. ‘Can I see him? Get him to come see me.’

J was still tackling the black mould in the bathroom when I wandered in to fetch him.

‘She really wants to say hello,’ I said. ‘She was so excited when she heard you’re here.’

J looked surprised, a little abashed.

My story is very different from his, but I understood the confusion – to live through many long years of your mother shutting you off, to suddenly clamouring for your attention was a lot.

‘I’ll come down in a minute. Let me get this done.’

A wicked part of me poked my brain while I made mum another drink of lemonade and orange.

All these years, her children had wanted her so badly, and she wasn’t interested. Now the tables were turned, wouldn’t it be…deliciously cruel…to tell her I hate her and leave forever.

A fizzing feeling rose from my base up through my chest. A peverse joy at the idea of breaking her heart even a fraction of the way she broke mine when she chose the man who nonced me over her own daughter. I felt a little dizzy.

Then a cold wave washed over my chest. I thought about her crying. How miserably she sobbed to me the few times in the last couple of weeks when she realised her mortality. How she occasionally looked at me with genuine, adoring love from a tiny body barely capable of moving.

I couldn’t do that to her.

Shortly after I took mum her drink, J stomped into the room.

‘Hiya!’ She beamed at him. Her gums showed. I noticed a part of them looked black.

She wanted a hug. J pretended to have a bad cold which he didn’t want her to catch. I could see the turmoil turning in his head like a foamy wave. He didn’t know her any more than I did.

‘Right.’ Mum said after a bit of small talk, ‘You’re to go upstairs and get Toby for me.’

J glanced at me.

‘Who the hell is Toby?’ He mouthed.

‘I don’t friggin’ know,’ I mouthed back.

‘ARE YOU LISTENING?’ Mum snipped, making me jump. ‘Toby is Billy’s partner in crime.’

‘Oh, right,’ J said. ‘What’s he look like?’

‘IF YOU WAIT A MINUTE, I’LL TELL YOU.’

J and I pursed our lips, I tried not to laugh.

‘He’s got a blue jumper,’ Mum said after a long pause, ‘and a red hat.’

To be honest, that didn’t narrow it down much. The piles of teddies in her bedroom were all wearing RNLI gear – often with blue jumper and hat.

But off J went dutifully.

He returned shortly with a teddy the same size as Billy. One which was wearing a red hat and red scarf.

‘That’s him,’ mum said when J presented him gingerly. I was impressed. There was so many teddies up there it was a wonder he’d found the right one.

She wanted Toby next to Billy. She sat with her teddies flush against the wall, looking pleased.

I was dealing with an especially massive cobweb in the pantry when mum called for me again. For a dying woman, she sure could shout loudly.

‘I need you to go get J,’ she snipped when I bundled in.

I wandered into the kitchen. T told me that J was outside. So I grabbed myself another SlimFast shake and scrolled my phone.

Shortly after, J slouched back into the kitchen.

‘I just needed a minute,’ he said quietly. He must have struggled to see all those teddy bears piled up on the drawers.

It hit me too, then, how lonely mum must have been. With her husband disconnected mentally and – according to her – violent, she had nobody but her teddies.

I remembered D telling me after the initial visit at the start of the year, how all her many teddies were lined up on the back of the sofa “so they could watch TV or something. It was dead weird.”

‘She’s asking for you again,’ I said.

Off J went to the living room.

Shortly after, there was a huffing and a series of thuds from the landing.

T and I wandered through to the foyer with interest.

J was attempting to drag a heavy chest down the stairs. Despite being filled with the relatively light crochet and knitting gubbins, the chest itself was solid wood and apparently not the lightest.

‘I feel a bit useless,’ I said to T, as we watched J huff and puff around the wooden case. He dragged it along to the little flat part of the stairs, sweat poking from his brow.

‘We’re helping by looking pretty,’ T offered.

‘Yep,’ I said, well aware on four hours’ sleep I looked like absolute shit.

J pushed the chest over the carpet into the living room, huffing loudly.

‘Right,’ he gasped when mum looked up at him, ‘it’s here. Where you want it?’

‘Where I can see it.’

I moved the chairs around. We found a place for the box to her liking.

‘That’s fine,’ she said finally.

Given the state of her, I knew mum was never going to crochet again. But it was enough to make her think that she would. At this point, everything was about making her happy.

But it was bloody hard.

Tired from telling her family members what to do, mum passed out with Toby and Billy propped in her arm. T collared me.

‘I need you to put together a coat rack,’ she said. ‘It’s upstairs, in The Man Who Is Not Your Father’s room.’

T had been setting the room up for the carer. It was cleaned well, although years of dust lay stubbornly on the skirting boards. The flatpack coat rack waited for me in a slim cardboard box.

The Man Who Is Not My Father’s room used to be mine, when I was a teen. Back then, I filled it with books and beanbags and chaotically-arranged piles of clothes.

The room which greeted me now was spartan; only a bed, tall lamp, bedside table, and a small pile of nautical notes in the far corner.

It was bizarre walking in, nearly a decade and a half since those slats kissed my feet.

It was even more bizarre to see the bed base that I’d been abused on.

I have no idea where that bed base was stored all that time. It might have been stashed in the garage; up on the rafters away from view.

Honestly, the fact The Man Who Is Not My Father managed to pull it from the garage to put in an upstairs bedroom by himself was impressive considering he’d been recovering from a stroke.

The king-sized bed base has four drawers – two on either side. It’s embroidered with golden thread. The drawer faces are plush with padding. I can remember pressing them with my tiny fingers, watching the material depress and fill out.

Back then, I only knew it as Mum’s bed. I had no idea that The Man Who Is Not My Father slept in it when my brother and I weren’t there.

I used to sit in the slip between Mum’s bed and the piss-stained camp cot. That felt like my special place, where read my picture books. I’d prop myself with my back on the plush bed box, little feet on the camp bed, reading some hardback about witches or the great plague or astrology.

Mum got me a toy horse that came with nail varnish vials. It was some newsagent knockoff of Fashion Star Fillies; a popular 1980s series of toy horses with bright manes and accessories.

My horse had leg warmers and hair clips, I remember that much. I also remember it was white, and the packaging showed pristinely-shaped varnish glitter flowers on the rump of the toy.

As far as I recall it didn’t come with stamps, so eight-year-old me tried to replicate those flawless shapes by freehand. I sat on the dusty brown carpet, carefully unscrewing the varnishes and dotting my toy with the watery fluid.

I wasn’t very good at it.

I got a lot on my fingers. I wiped the excess off on the plush drawers of the bed box, repeatedly pulling the duvet down as if this would hide the marks forever.

The varnishes were fluorescent, 80s colours – lime green, hot pink, bitter orange, highlighter yellow.

Mum never said a word about those daubings. She must have seen them.

I can’t remember if I dabbed those soft drawers before or after I woke in the night to the thing that grown-ups do.

But it was that particular part of the bed – already daubed or not - above which my face was lying when The Man Who Is Not My Father put his semi-erect penis in my mouth.

He thought I was asleep. Perhaps I had been on previous occasions. I will never know how many times he did it.

I hope that was the only time he did it. But I do remember waking for school and feeling like my privates were hot. I do remember waking with a weird taste in my mouth. I do remember waking with a crusty substance on my cheek, my forehead, my chin.

I cannot tell you how it felt to see those daubings thirty years later.

I stared at those fluorescent thumbprints for a good ten minutes, even as the coat rack poles slipped in my hands. It was surreal. My big brother scrubbing away at the mould in the bathroom, my aunt calming my angry mother directly underneath me – this was now, this was not thirty years ago.

I was not that little girl sleeping on a bare mattress threaded with gold polyester, woken by a wrinkly cock pressed on my tongue.

And yet, I was that little girl. I was a little girl at the age of thirty-seven.

27/06/2026

‘You’re not LISTENING to what I’m SAYING!’ She shouted at me. With my aunt and brother both occupied fixing up the house, I was taking the brunt of the anger.

‘Mum, me and T can’t go on looking after you 24/7. The alternative is you go into a hospice, which I know you don’t want…’

‘What about POWER OF ATTORNEY?’

‘Er…what about power of attorney?’

‘You’re not LISTENING TO ME.’

It was distressing. A full ten minutes of a woman who had no idea what she was trying to say getting upset because I had no clue either.

‘Oh just FUCK OFF then!’ She shouted eventually, gripping her teddy Billy hard in her hands. ‘Just FUCK OFF AND NEVER COME BACK.’

I did not fuck off. I watched helplessly as my mother cried.

I don’t understand you.

‘We aren’t abandoning you, you know,’ I chirped up eventually. ‘We are all going to visit. You’re going to have someone here all the time to look after you. A professional.’

She glared at me.

‘And it means,’ I pressed, ‘that you won’t have to worry about anything. You can concentrate on feeling better. We’re giving the house a really good clean right now, you don’t need to worry about that either.’

She perked up a bit.

‘I won’t have to worry about anything?’

‘No, mum. We’re sorting out care for The Man Who Is Not My Father too. He’s safe, we’re getting him sorted with a good care home. Everything’s okay, mum.’

Her eyes were wet. She was like a little child.

‘So, can I start on these cobwebs in here, then?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, go on. But get me some juice first.’

I could hear her muttering to herself while I poured a sippy cup of juice in the kitchen. Half Schweppes lemonade, half orange juice. She would only have Schweppes, maybe because it was the lemonade they served at the bar she used to run.

There was a few cans of Guinness in the fridge – both normal, and zero alcohol.

‘She said she bought some,’ my brother D told me when mum was first admitted to hospital, ‘for The Man Who Is Not Our Father. To make him feel better.’

I thought of that anecdote as I flipped open a lemonade can. And that sign perched up in the laundry room: GUINESS GIVES YOU STRENGTH.

My mother was always a very clever woman, yet she believed advertising drummed into her from youth. The idea that Guinness has a load of iron in it.

Guinness has barely any iron in it. You can call camel piss a source of iron if you want – it’s technically true. And to be fair to mum, for a long time even doctors were fooled into prescribing the gooey stout to pregnant women. Yes, really.

Taking up most of the fridge shelving was about a hundred 200ml bottles of strawberry-flavoured Fortijuce juice, a high protein concoction that is, unlike Guinness, full of vitamins.

A milkshake version of same was designated to the back of the bottom shelf, because it was “bloody gopping”.

Mum was prescribed at least one of those bottles a day, but I’d seen her manage maybe one and a half total on all the days I’d cared for her. Sometimes she’d try to down one, flinching against the taste, only to chuck it back up right seconds later.

‘I’m bloody sick of this,’ she would mutter yet again, trying to daub the juice from her chin.

She so wanted to get better. She really, really wanted to start living her life again. Mobility seats and walkers still stood in the kitchen and hallway at her behest, for when she would walk again. She even asked me where I’d like to go for “a family holiday”. She wanted to take her children and sister to Florida.

She knew she had fucked up. She wanted to fix it.

She was not ready to die.

‘ALEXA! PLAY YORK MIX RADIO.’ Mum shouted when I wandered back in, juice in one hand and feather duster in the other.

‘It’s playing already, mum. Alexa, volume up!’

A bleep. Taylor Swift became louder, unfortunately.

I propped the sippy bottle into mum’s long-nailed hand, and messed with the bed controls to sit her up. Then I opened the curtains.

Warm sunlight pressed down on the carpet, which was thick with dust. Relics from the hotel bar she ran with The Man Who Is Not My Father sat on the windowsill. Fancy, empty whisky boxes. A porcelain elephant. A little brass cannon. I can remember shoving my tiny finger in the end when I was a child, and panicking when I couldn’t pull it out.

‘So who’s here?’ Mum demanded, while I twirled an enormous cobweb around the duster.

‘Your son D and your sister T.’

‘Can you go get them. I want a word.’

‘They’re busy, mum.’

‘I said, I WANT A WORD.’

Jesus. That angry tone still made my shoulders stiff. Off I ran.

Both D and T came down. The three of us stood expectantly at the bottom of the bed.

‘Right,’ mum said, her long nails prodding the air between us. ‘You’ll need to fix that wonky skirting board in the bathroom,’

‘Yeah,’ D said. ‘I’m doing that now. Do you know where the missing plank from the flooring went?’

‘No. The Man Who Is Not Your Father was trying all sorts of renovations. I couldn’t stop him.’

She looked downcast. Four years being her husband’s carer. Alone, in this house with the guy after his stroke, his brain deteriorating, increasingly violent…she’d been miserable.

‘It’s alreet,’ D said cheerfully. ‘I’ll sort it.’

‘Will you?’ She looked at her youngest with genuine gratitude, then seemed to catch herself. ‘The tap in the bathroom isn’t working either,’ she snipped.

‘Right.’

‘And the ensuite shower is in a bit of a state.’

You’re not kidding, I thought, thinking of the mould. Some of the patches were so big, they looked ready to peel off and go down to the local for a pint.

‘We’re going to sort that,’ T said. Mum actually looked impressed, delighted.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘This is lovely. I could get used to this.’

‘Erm,’ I interjected, eyeing the scrawled notebook at her bedside, ‘Do you want to tell us about the things you’ve been seeing?’

Despite the Home Hospice nurses’ speculation, her hallucinations didn’t sound like painkiller side-effects to me. I could see she was dying, probably imminently, and wanted my family’s opinion.

‘I wrote about it,’ mum perked up. ‘Didn’t I Sar? Last night I wrote about what I saw.’

She’d had her couple of glasses of knock-off Baileys, and I’d left her with a pen and notepad. She read her notes out to me in the early morning, and they were nonsense.

It’s not the medication, my mother’s brain is turning into soup.

She flapped her long nails at the bedside table. I picked up the notepad, put it in her hands.

‘Right, you listening?’ She looked meaningfully at my brother and aunt.

‘Yep.’ D said.

‘Right,’ She straightened herself a little, about to perform.

Then:

‘I thought I saw a…woman in…corner walls.’ She squinted at her own writing. ‘Then the part that…wasn’t up…went down.’

She glanced meaningfully at us, then back at the paper.

‘I took the…sandwich with…my hands and the nails weren’t on them. So my hands fell off.’

I’ll admit it: I struggled not to laugh here.

‘Then…microwave kettle,’ she continued, ‘with most of it on the plate. Going…round…the tinsel, but not in the room. It worked because…ham sandwich. Not…but…especially.’

She looked at us like a child reading a top-graded essay to her parents.

‘Right,’ D said eventually. ‘That’s interesting.’

She loved that. Her face softened. She curled her fingers at the paper edge demurely.

‘Well, I just thought I’d write it down.’

‘Yeah,’ D continued. ‘I think you should keep on at that.’

‘Do you?’ Her eyes filled with stars. She looked at my brother like he were her dad. I choked up a little, it was so sweet.

Exhausted by her performance, she fell into a nap. While D and T continued their work around the house, I took the paper pad from her lap. She’d been trying to write a shopping list too.

Her handwriting was as beautiful as I remember. But the shapes and sizes of the letters were inconsistent. They spread across the page in odd gaps. Between words were scrawls of shapes, usually squares. Squiggles.

She used to be one of the most articulate women I have ever met. To see the nosedive on that slip of paper was…something. It was something.

‘Are you okay, love?’

She’d woken up, staring at me through bleary eyelids. It was her. It was Mum. My Mum. That woman from so long ago.

‘Yes, Mum. I’m okay, I’m just getting things sorted for you.’

‘Okay,’ she smiled, and passed back out.

I gently tucked her hair behind her ear.

Oh, Mum. You really are a pillock.

The syringe driver with bulky cassette was getting on my tits, to be honest.

The hospital home care bed was a little smaller than a single bed width-wise, so perching the cassette under the pillow was practically asking for it to be knocked off.

The syringe tube tangled around mum’s arm as she did her agitated, subconscious moving. Some nights, she would pull the needle from her skin, then complain of pain all day.

‘This reminds me of that Fantasia video,’ I said, propping the cartridge on the bedside table and eyeing the in-line. ‘You remember? When I was four, I slept with the VHS as a teddy every night.’

She nodded a little, then grimaced. I gently pulled her arm, peeked under her shoulder.

‘Oh,’ I muttered. ‘The syringe has fallen out again.’

‘Oh, bugger.’

Putting down my feather duster for a minute, I got her some oxycodone. She just about managed to get the syringe into her mouth, and push it herself.

When the St Leonards Hospice carers came for their afternoon visit, mum wasn’t as chatty with them as usual.

‘Are we alright to freshen you up, Kay?’ The ethereally pretty one asked. Her colleague, a woman in her mid 50s sporting a red glasses and streaky-dyed pixie cut combo, took a basin of warm water from me in the kitchen.

‘How are you holding up?’ She asked.

‘Erm, well…’

‘I’m asking because…we share information. So I know about the…trauma around being here, and…was it your mum’s partner?’

‘Thank you. I’ve put it in a mental box for now. She’s been seeing things.’

‘Right.’

‘I thought it might be because the cancer got to her brain?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so, given where it is,’ the basin sloshed in her hands. ‘It could be the medication.’

I wondered if she was saying this to make me feel better. To give me hope.

‘Well,’ the carer added chirpily, ‘I’ll be back this evening, so we can have a bit of a regroup then. Just wanted to be sure you’re alright.’ She smiled, and off she went.

How do they do it? I thought. I wasn’t sure what to do with all the empathy. It certainly wasn’t something the walls of the house had seen in an awfully long time.

I stood at the sink and glared at my reflection in the window above it. I remembered that exact pose – teary, mascara running, a heck of a lot younger – staring back the night my first boyfriend dumped me.

It was at the school disco. The Man Who Is Not My Father picked me up, drove me home wordlessly while I quietly cried in the passenger seat.

Then, when I ran the kitchen tap for a glass of water, Mum gently said:

‘If you want to talk to me about it, you can. Alright, kiddo?’

A peek of Mum. That woman from within the muddy shell.

I never talked to her about it.

Because I was used to being rebuffed, or her being annoyed with me. There was nothing to suggest that when I wanted Mum, she would come out rather than the cold, bristly woman she was most of the time.

I stared at my reflection a little longer, listening to the soft chattering of the carers in the living room.

‘He wasn’t even nice,’ I told my sixteen-year-old self’s reflection. ‘He took his clothes off on MSN Messenger a year after he dumped you. I didn’t even ask him to, he just did it. It was like a yam. It wasn’t worth seeing, kiddo.’

The ghost of myself walked again through those walls.

(And sixteen-year-old me must have heard my future self, because she started fancying some other boy the day after the disco anyway.)

T told me she’d had a call from the district nurse. Someone was going to come over and get rid of the bloody syringe driver to swap with a pain patch. I went to tell mum.

‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘Cos it’s been playing silly beggars.’

It was beeping intermittently. I picked it up from under the pillow, detangling the line.

‘I can’t get it to shut up,’ I muttered, pressing the single accessible button. The LCD screen glowed; fifteen minutes of painkiller left.

‘ALEXA!’ Mum shouted, ‘PLAY YORK MIX RADIO.’

‘Mum, for f…you made me jump out of my skin.’

‘Oh, did I?’ She grinned at me, ‘She’s not listening to me though. ALEXA.’

‘Mum, it’s playing the radio.’

‘PLAY YORK MIX RADIO.’

‘Mum, mum it’s already on. It’s playing Michael Bublé.’

‘It’s not!’ Mum grouched.

‘Alexa! Volume up!’

Michael became altogether too loud for my liking.

‘How come she does it when you say?’

‘I don’t know mum, maybe she likes me better.’

‘ALEXA….’ She looked at me for a moment. ‘What did I want her for?’

‘I don’t know mum.’

‘ALEXA…Oh, I wish you’d bugger off.’

The Alexa thought for a moment, before replying:

‘I don’t know how to do that.’

Mum and I looked at each other, and burst out laughing. I shoved the beeping cassette in a nearby drawer.

Mum was confused, forgetful. But she was becoming something else more frequently – not the mum I knew from my teens who made The Man Who Is Not My Father her entire world, the one who cut off her own children to protect him.

As her brain fell away, Mum came out – that vibrant and funny creature that doted on her children and hated seeing them sad.

‘Are you alright, love?’ She asked again when I wandered in with my feather duster after a bit of a mental breakdown. Eyes already sore from crying, I thought I’d start up again.

Mum, I thought. I’ve missed you so, so much. Where have you been?

‘I’m fine Mum,’ I lied, ‘The nurses are coming to get that thing out of your arm. We’ve going to use a patch thing instead. Like one of those nicotine patches.’

‘I quit smoking.’

‘I know, Mum, but this one’s for your pain.’

‘Oh. Okay. Is anyone coming over today?’

‘Just the district nurse, and then the carers in the evening.’

‘Right. So, who’s looking after the dog?’

This threw me. She was talking about Bru, a border collie I dog sit for. I’d had to bring him with me on one visit. She used to have a collie – another thing only just learned about her.

She was a closed book opening only when the story was about to end.

Mum smiled from ear to ear when the dog stared up at her goofily, tongue lolling from his mouth. We caught her on a good evening, that night.

‘Er, Bru is with his dad,’ I said levelly. ‘He’s at my place looking after my rats.’

‘Well, if he’s looking after Bru and your rats, how can you be here?’

She pointed at me with those long nails. I felt like I was in a courtroom.

‘Er, I’m here because I’m here looking after you.’

‘Right. So Bru doesn’t exist.’

‘No, Mum, Bru does exist.’

‘So Bru’s dad doesn’t exist then.’

‘Mum, he…hang on.’

I texted the dog’s dad asking for a selfie of the pair of them. Despite using the caveat ‘to prove to my dying mother that you both exist’ he delivered with no contextual queries.

‘Right,’ Mum said. Her nails clicked on my phone as she studied the photo closely. ‘I see.’

Then, after another pause:

‘So you’re not here then.’

‘Mum, Mum I’m clearly here…’

A slip of understanding shone through the mud..

‘I’m sick of this,’ she muttered.

‘I know, Mum. I know.’

Another long pause.

‘So the dog isn’t real then?

Shortly after, a district nurse showed up. She took away the beeping syringe driver, gently pulling the canular from Mum’s emaciated arm.

‘I’m just going to put this patch on your back, okay?’ The young nurse said. It was a large plaster-like sticker. It would give Mum the not inconsiderable pain relief she needed. That huge tumour was pushing her insides out.

By the time T and D left and the carers came in the evening, Mum was exhausted. They changed her, freshened her up, and she was barely conscious.

Afterwards, she still wanted a glass of knock-off Baileys.

Sleepy, but still wanting a chat, she talked at me about cheese. Especially one she had somewhere, some part of the past that she could not pinpoint.

‘It was amazing. It was really strong, it came in little barrels.’

‘Can you still get it, then?’ I asked.

‘You know what, I’ve never seen it in years in years.’

This was it. The pointless, chatty conversations I’d been fantasising about for more than a decade. Anecdotes and comparisons that would have bored the arse off anyone listening in.

She passed out with the glass of knock-off Baileys propped up against her arm.

I took the glass. She stirred in her sleep when I did, so I stroked her forehead and hair. She didn’t wake up, but turned to her side and curled up a little.

I Billy on the pillow beside her, and went to sleep a few meters away on the living room sofa.

I just wanted to be near her. I wanted to be near Mum.

I was not ready to lose her again.

17/05/26

Back in my own home, I slept for two days solid. My heart hurt. I found myself crying and moaning as if I were sick.

My brother D, concerned and no longer chucking up in a caravan, let me know the whole paternity thing was irrelevant to him. A little sternly, he pointed out how much he and T and our brother J were pulling together to get through this. I needed to show up too.

It felt harsh, to be honest, given the shock of such a revelation on top of reopening the molestation wound. The flashbacks had become intense. Every time mum was snippy and rude to me, the thread stopping me from telling her to fuck off to her paedophile husband became very taut indeed.

But I had become too wrapped up in my PTSD. Mum’s sister and my two brothers have trauma too, but they showed up because “it’s the right thing to do”.

Which it is. It doesnt matter that mum wouldn’t have done the same for us.

Well, she would have…the woman she was before The Man Who Is Not My Father did what he did would have shown up for us.

I cannot properly articulate how difficult it is to provide care for a family member, especially if they are pretty much helpless. Each time I did a shift, the three or four nights nearly destroyed me.

Even without the absolute exhaustion, the constant requests (or demands, if she was in a bad mood) drive you down. On one afternoon, even though she’d told me to fuck off (I can’t remember why), mum called me every ten minutes from 2pm to sometime after eight when she finally fell asleep.

Usually, it was to pick her sippy cup from her bedside, then shout at me because “it’s not coming out” (she wasn’t tipping it enough, but if I tried to guide her, she’d slap my hand away).

She’d call because she was “too hot” or “not right”, to ask the time or if the fan heater was on (it always was).

Even when she was sleeping and I laid down for a nap, my body was flush with adrenaline. Then some thirty minutes later when I was nodding off, she’d call out again.

She’d demand to be moved to a certain position, then insist that wasn’t what she asked for.

‘YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO ME,’ she shouted, ‘I NEVER SAID I WANTED TO BE ON MY SIDE. I WANT TO BE ON MY SIDE.’

On the fifth day after I last cleared off back home, T had her own little breakdown.

‘I’m leaving,’ she told D on the phone while power-walking to the bus stop. ‘You have to come look after her.’

Apparently, mum really went at her sister. Telling her to fuck off, bringing up T’s late husband, screaming and all sorts. After five days waiting on her hand and foot with little sleep, and doing at least 70% of the full-time care days since mum had been discharged from hospital, T reached her limit.

But T calmed down, and she went back to her sister.

“It’s the right thing to do.”

Out of me and my two full-time employed brothers, I was the only one feasably able to provide 24/7 care and give poor T a break.

So I put all of my PTSD, anger, and horrible memories in a great big mental box and shoved it into the darkness.

I drove up to take over from T the morning of the 7^th day of her run.

‘Are you going to be alright?’ My aunt asked, during our debrief in the kitchen.

‘I’ve put everything in a box,’ I said, ‘And shoved it over there.’

‘Right,’ T nodded, clearly grateful, ‘And I hope you’ve wrapped chains around it, put it in another box, wrapped that up with chains…’

‘Yep,’ I laughed.

‘I’ve sorted out 24/7 care,’ she told me at some point, very much out of mum’s ear shot. ‘They’re going to start on Wednesday.’

‘You’re kidding?’ I was drinking one of mum’s Slim-Fast shakes at the time, and dribbled it down my chin. It’s not like a woman weighing less than six stone is going to need these, I’d thought as I dibsed the sixpack of them. ‘How?’

‘I just kept on at them. She needs 24/7 care.’

‘Yes, she absolutely does. And it’s not like we know what we are doing.’

I glanced at the kitchen table. It was piled with boxes of medications I couldn’t even pronounce the name of, never mind understand what they were supposed to do.

‘I’ve not broached the subject yet…’ T looked a little furtively towards the kitchen door. ‘So don’t mention it. Me and D are coming over Sunday to tell her, and get the place ready, because the carer’s going to need a bed and a room to sleep in. She can’t stay on the sofa.’

‘Agreed,’ I wiped my chin. Since the start of this, mum had adamantly refused to let T or me sleep on either her or her husband’s bed, getting very angry whenever we broached the subject. Thus far, it had been easier to just let her have her way.

The relief of knowing I wouldn’t need to do any more unpaid, untrained shifts caring for someone who encapsulated so much mental agony was wonderful. I’m so grateful to live in a country where support is accessible for families like mine.

‘OH, PISS OFF,’ Mum’s voice cut through the air. ‘GERRAWAY WI’ YER.’

‘Who’s she talking to?’ I asked.

‘People who aren’t there,’ T shrugged. ‘She’s been doing it a lot.’

Mum started laughing to herself. At least she sounded happy.

That evening, mum asked for “a snifter”. I googled whether she could have alcohol with painkillers. Answer: normally, no. But if you’ve got weeks left, fuck it. Have a drink.

I cracked open a bottle of knock-off Baileys. One from Aldi, I think. She wanted about a finger with some ice. A little nervous considering the woman is an alcoholic, I watered it down ever so slightly.

‘Straw!’ She shouted when I plonked the short glass on the table beside her.

I cut a straw in half and propped it into the milky drink. Unable to sit up by herself, she needed the head of the hospital bed whirring up. I pressed the drink into her cold fingers.

‘Oh my God,’ she said after a sip. ‘This is bliss!’

I chuckled as she pretty much inhaled the rest.

‘Get me another one?’ She weakly tried to lift the glass. I took it before the ice went everywhere.

For the next hour, she sipped at a second (and then a third!) glass of the knock-off Baileys, enjoying herself. She told me about her favourite drinks, about the kind of mischief her and T got up to on nights out in their youth; how they would order a big glass of sangria with two straws and “get a bit gobby” with anyone they disliked.

She told me about her father’s home brew – a bitter so strong it’d melt your eyelashes. Her mother used to drink barley wine. They were poor, but they got by. Her dad rode his bike to and from work every day, and filled the holes in his shoes with cardboard.

I got the bed comfy for her, and propped her teddy at her bony shoulder. She fell asleep smiling.

Mum slept right through till 6am. She woke me by singing.

‘Nana nana nana nana Batman!’ She chirped, amongst other mutterings and laughter.

I tried to go back to sleep, but she called for me soon after.

‘Hellooooo?’ I think she’d given up working out if I’m Sarah, Louis, or her Amazon assistant Alexa.

I trundled into the room, my blanket wrapped around me.

‘Yeah?’

‘Oh hiya. What time is it please?’

I peered groggily at the dust-coated clock on the mantlepiece.

‘It’s quarter past six.’

‘In the morning?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s quarter of an hour after you last came in, then.’ She said chirpily.

‘You what?’ I asked, brain creaking.

‘You came in here at six o’ clock and said it’s six o’ clock.’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘Yes you did, I saw you.’

Oh, so now she’s hallucinating me. That’s creepy. I’m not sure I like that.

‘Do you need anything?’ I asked, choosing to leave that particular battle.

‘Can you do me a boiled egg and toast?’

It was a good day, that Saturday. Mum only told me to fuck off and never come back once, and that was because she wanted more Baileys thinking it was seven in the evening. It was seven in the morning. I know she’s dying, but I draw the line at morning Baileys.

The sun was shining, so I pulled the curtains wide and opened the windows. Warm air, tinted with the promise of summer, swirled into the stuffy room.

‘There’s the bitch, again!’ Mum shouted suddenly, mid-sentence. She pointed towards the doorway.

‘Who?’ For a moment I was terrified one of the carers had let themselves in. Mum had been getting progressively ruder, after all.

‘That bitch, I just saw her run past the doorway,’ she shouted, annoyed. ‘That blummin’ leprechaun! I just saw her again!’

I can assure you there are no leprechauns in that house. I think I’d have noticed.

‘What does she look like?’

‘She’s little and she’s got a big pointy nose, and a pointy hat.’

‘So, a witch?’

‘No!’ She flapped her hand at me. ‘Not a witch. I know what a bloody witch looks like.’

‘How often do you see her?’

‘I saw her yesterday and all.’

‘Maybe it’s a gnome.’

‘It’s not a bloody gnome!’

Hallucinations are an end-of-life symptom that I’d been briefed to report to the carers. It could mean death is on its way.

‘Have you seen anything else?’

‘I’ve seen a woman and a little girl, in old clothes. Stood in the hallway. And my mum.’

‘You saw your mum?’

‘Yeah. I’ve seen her a couple of times. And a man, a pitch-black man, but I can’t see his eyes.’

Yep. Okay. Great. That was it for me, thank you. It was hard enough sleeping on that old sofa without thinking about some shadow person watching like an inter-dimensional pervert.

‘It’s okay,’ one of the carers told me later, ‘if the hallucinations aren’t distressing her.’

But what if they’re distressing me? I thought, thinking of deep, empty eye sockets floating in the ether.

I slept with the light on that night.

The next morning, mum awoke me at another godforsaken hour with more singing.

‘Doo doo doo, Superman!’

A medley of Queen songs followed, including excerpts from Freddie Mercury’s solo album. It was nice to hear her happy, having full conversations with invisible people. One of them in particular was making her laugh like a drain.

‘Who you talking to?’ I asked when I trudged in, having written sleep off.

‘Oo hello. Can I have some more juice, please? And I can’t find Billy. Is D coming today?’

‘Yes, mum.’

‘Can you get him to bring us some Twix?’

The pile of requested chocolates and biscuits was growing by the day. She was always remembering some sweet treat she hadn’t had in ages, asking for it right up until we sourced it.

‘I don’t know why you’ve brought Milkybar,’ she’d told me after three days going on about wanting some, ‘I’ve never liked Milkybar.’

D and my aunt were due to come over at lunch time – as far as mum knew, for a visit. Really, it was for that chat about the carer moving in.

With mum dozing, I went to scan the whole house for things we’d need to fix. And by ‘we’ I mean, ‘D chucked into the room with his toolbox while T and I occasionally throw biscuits through a gap in the door’.

Even though I’d been looking after mum regularly for a month, I hadn’t quite noticed how bad the house was.

This was partly because mum wouldn’t let me notice.

I know that sounds odd especially she was confined to a hospital bed, but she was always controlling with things in her home that didn’t need controlling. Things like, not allowing myself or my brother to touch the thermostat – to the point they had it installed too high up for us to reach without them hearing the creak of stairs.

I can remember every time I came down from my room in the evening as a teen, hearing them muttering about which one of us it was and what it sounded like we were doing. And if there was a drawer or cupboard opened, in would bundle The Man Who Is Not My Father wanting to know what I wanted.

Their weekly Asda shop was sacred. Although the time was reserved in the afternoon, an entire day was blocked out for it. Which meant D and I could do absolutely nothing else – I couldn’t go for a walk to the village because I’d need to be let in again, even if it was 10am, because “we’re going to Asda this afternoon”. Mum really would get pissy about stuff like that.

We were absolutely not allowed to use the oven on an evening. If I was hungry late at night, even if I’d been at work, I had to grab something cold from the fridge or Mum and The Man Who Is Not My Father would kick off. Even the idea of an oven meal popped into the hatch for twenty minutes was offensive to them.

Except for now and again, when that sweet cheerful woman peeked from the bars of her angry, mum-shaped shell – and Mum, drunk, made me fried mashed potato or eggy bread at 11pm while we chatted. It was exceptionally rare, but magical.

One time when my brother and I were staying over on a break from university, mum and The Man Who Is Not My Father went away sailing. When they came back, I was most surprised to be confronted by my mother about the baked lemon cake I’d attempted and subsequently burned. The only way they could have known about that was if they went through the bins. And I’ll bet you any amount of money that’s exactly what they did; it was just the kind of people they were.

In the many years since, the abject hatred of the world and people around them got worse.

There’s a posh-looking block of flats on the land next to the house now. I remember it being a burned carcass of a building, and later a flattened carpet of grass. At some point, the land was sold to a developer who went ahead and made good use of it.

‘They were absolute pricks about it,’ D told me. ‘They were complaining and having a go and writing letters and all sorts.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Cos they are pricks,’ D shrugged. ‘That’s why their driveway is still fucked. The developers were going to re-tarmac it for free, but they were such pricks they were like “fuck ‘em” and didn’t bother.”

There’s a lovely, smooth tarmac road with clean paving and fresh saplings leading right up to the block of flats’ car park. At the corner where the long drive to mum’s house begins, it stops abruptly.

And then there’s about a million signs encouraging people to very much piss off.

PRIVATE PROPERTY, DO NOT ENTER

NO THROUGH-ROAD. PRIVATE PROPERTY.

NO TRESPASSING. TRESSPASSING IS ILLEGAL.

They are faded from years of sunlight.

All things considered, I thought as I crept up to the upstairs landing, mum letting carers into her home three times a day after purposely cutting herself off for so long is something I should – kind of – be proud of her for.

It must be hard to let strangers in to your home at the best of times, never mind if you didn’t let your own children in for the last fifteen years.

Since being stuck in that little hospital bed in the living room, my aunt, D and I had done what we could to maintain her sense of control.

At first, she played Hell when she heard the creak of stairs without her permission. The whole reason T and I were sleeping on that squishy sofa in the dining room, rather than one of the two whole-ass beds upstairs, was because mum didn’t want us to. We were unclear on why, but went with it because, odd as it sounds, it was easier.

The cobwebs. There were so many cobwebs.

Every single corner at the ceiling or floor sported at least one. Each was covered in dust.

Even though I’d visited and stayed over a good few times in the weeks prior, I’d not notice just how bad it was. I knew it was dirty, but the more I really started looking, the worse it got.

I wanted to use the shower. I used to wash every weeknight in that same cubicle when I was in college; the Imperial Leather foam in metal cans felt like a real treat.

But when I shifted the curtain, I was greeted with black mould.

For a moment I saw the ghost of sixteen-year-old me, scrubbing myself amongst an obscene amount of shampoo and shower foam.

Then I noticed the ceiling – also pocked with mould. And cobwebs. And two instances of dead spider, one of them apparently having died while attempting to eat the other.

Long-gone plants sat on the windowsills in most of the rooms, often coated with dust.

The corners of carpets were discoloured with dirt.

When I opened the master bedroom curtains, I was effectively bukkake’d by spurts of dust. A dead centipede dropped onto my foot for the money shot. Proud of myself for not screaming at that one.

When I crept into the second bathroom, with dated sink and bath squished up like a toddler’s Lego creation, I was surprised to see the flooring looked like an especially shit round of Tetris.

‘Do we know where that random chunk of flooring in the bathroom has fucked off to?’ I texted D.

‘Not a clue,’ D replied. ‘I did look. It’s not anywhere.’

Something very sharp caught on the foot of my tights. I narrowly avoided stepping on two slabs of upturned, dismembered skirting boards. Each sported three enormous masonry nails.

The Man Who Is Not My Father had been attempting D.I.Y. right up until his brain gave up entirely.

I wandered into his office. Because mum had sent me or my younger brother up here a few times to rifle through for some password or file or document, the room was messy.

Half-heartedly, I piled papers together and slipped them into meticulously-labelled, color-coded folders.

Plastic food containers were scattered around the large desk, some holding batteries or paperclips but most were empty; old Clover and Anchor butter tubs faded with age. I started piling them into each other, ready for the bin.

It struck me in that moment: for a man who was ever present in my childhood and teen years, I had absolutely no idea who he was.

He’d never offered information about himself, never tried to spend quality time with my brother or I before or after the outing of the molestation incidents. When he gave me a lift anywhere as a teen, he did so in absolute silence. He didn’t even tell me when his dad, a wonderful sweet man who played harmonica, passed away.

The only time I remember The Man Who Is Not My Father showing a slip of personality was one Christmas before the incident, when he carefully pulled Cinderella-themed fairy lights from a dusty box and let me hold the fragile carriages in my tiny fingers.

‘These belonged to my mum,’ he said, eyes wet. He smelled of alcohol.

His mum passed away when he was only five. In the entire time I knew him, he did not tell me a word about her. I only knew that she’d been married to the sweet old man with the harmonica, and she had those Cinderella fairy lights.

The Man Who Is Not My Father’s mental decline was written in notebooks and scraps of paper on his desk. Countless writings of the exact same login details, appointment times struck through and rewritten again and again, my mother’s mobile phone number on countless stubs and post-its.

He’d always written exclusively in block captials, but his bold, strong lettering became wobbly, faint. I found lists of numbers and symbols I didn’t understand, likely some shipping lingo – wind speed, latitudes and longitudes, weather station locations. Despite being off the waves for a long time, he’d kept track of things like that even back when I’d last seen him nearly fifteen years ago. Always perched over some sea map in the dining room.

I found a little notebook with his name on. It was a diary. A sailor’s diary.

Oddly transfixed, I sat down on the dusty carpet and started reading.

It wasn’t a juicy diary.

Written across 1992, a year before he met my mother and while in his late thirties, he wrote clinically about his time on a boat. Noting the onboarding of various acquaintances, moving from marina to marina or spanning some stretch of active water. He made a note of dinner on the mainland, or when some boat tool had a paddy.

There was absolutely no emotional information – nothing about how he felt, no jokes or observances. While it was interesting to think of him having these adventures, it didn’t make me know the bloke any more than the paltry amount I already did.

Beside a plastic in-tray, I noticed some little drawers marked for 1989.

“Sailing.”

His block capital writing, young and bold.

They were full of little Kodak projector slides. Photos of the deck of a boat, ropes wrapped around poles, big-booted men pulling at sails and smiling for the camera. I recognised him in a few, wearing a blue beanie hat. Even when he was young, he had a creepy look on his brow.

Or maybe I’m biased.

The majority of his photos, whether from projector slides or found loose in the room, had no people in them at all. Night photos taken around York, blurs of car lights running from the shutter; the outside of the grotty flat he had lived in with mum when my brother and I were little; a corner of York Minster, shot from the cold pavement below.

Only one photo I found of them together, mum and him. Taken apparently by surprise, both looking deer-eyed from the bar of the hotel they ran together. Mum with her big, crimped hair. Him with his watch facing inward.

I left his effects alone, still with no idea who this man was.

‘Do you support this?’ Mum snapped, glaring at me.

She was not taking the idea of a live-in carer well. T and D stood awkwardly at the end of her bed, while I carefully used the latter as a human shield.

‘Well, I think you need-‘ I began.

‘THAT’S NOT WHAT I ASKED,’ She shouted. ‘WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN TO WHAT I SAY?’

The three of us had been shouted at for a good ten minutes by this point. Mum was furious.

She didn’t understand that T and me looking after her for 24/7 shifts indefinitely wasn’t viable. I’d been unable to work at all while there, and T was going to go nuts without sleep. Not to mention with neither of us having carer training, we couldn’t even change her pants without putting her in danger and we certainly couldn’t administer the right medications.

‘Alright!’ I snapped back from the safety of my younger brother’s shoulder. ‘Yes, I support this. There’s no other option.’

She stared at me with that unbridled hatred she often did during my teen years. I retreated a little further behind my brother, who tensed his shoulders protectively.

‘Right.’ She shrugged eventually. ‘I guess it’s what we are doing then.’

The mood swings; God they were like a rollercoaster. An especially vomit-inducing one.

‘You’ll have someone here to look after you all the time,’ T said, while I pretended to be busy by sort of rearranging stuff that didn’t need rearranging. ‘It will be nice for you.’

She warmed to that idea. She warmed to the idea of having someone taking care of everything for her, so she wouldn’t have to worry. It would be like having a friend.

‘And I’ll be able to sit here and just crochet,’ mum said brightly.

‘Yeah!’ I encouraged her, knowing very well she was no longer capable of holding anything without help.

With various tasks still outstanding, T and D peeled off upstairs and I wandered into the kitchen to tidy up. I heard loud thuds from upstairs – probably D hammering those lethal skirting boards back in.

I heard mum muttering to herself. I poked my head out the kitchen, and saw her sitting with Billy in her lap. She was talking to him, and crying.

29/04/2026

I needn’t have worried. I walked back in to the stuffy living room to find her chewing on the last of her fruit pastilles.

‘You know what would be lovely,’ she said, oblivious to my distress, ‘a cup of tea.’

‘I can give it a go,’ I said. I’d literally never made my own mother a cup of tea, so this was a bit bizarre on all levels. ‘Milk, sugar?’

‘One sugar, lots of milk. Is the fan heater on?’

‘Yes, the fan heater is on.’

‘I’m bloody freezing.’

‘I’ll do your dinosaur in a minute.’

Her dinosaur is her hot water bottle, with a plush cover in the shape of a dinosaur. There have been many arguments between me and the carers about whether it’s a dinosaur or a rhino. My aunt is adamant it’s a hippo. It is not a hippo it’s a dinosaur.

Mum seemed to take comfort from knowing the dinosaur was there, at the bottom of the bed. In the same way she took comfort from Billy, her little teddy bear, always propped up beside her.

It was clear from how she kept pushing the thick duvet off herself, that mum was again confusing hot for cold. The living room was hotter than Pedro Pascal. But I took the dinosaur and went to fill it all the same, being sure to keep the door wide open to get cool air in there without her noticing.

I flicked the kettle on and put a teabag into a mug. I stared at the worktop, concentrating, forcing myself to see shapes and creatures in the granite. A rat. Threads. Lines across lines. A bunch of flowers. A dinosaur, not a hippo.

Mentally, I was trying to distance myself from the situation. I envisaged stepping away from a wide closet and a skeleton twitching within it; the skeleton’s jaw clipped and called, telling me the man who I’d spent my whole life calling Dad actually wasn’t my dad.

In a dark, dark town there was a dark, dark street
And in the dark, dark street there was a dark, dark house
And in the dark, dark house there were some dark, dark stairs
And down the dark, dark stairs there was a dark, dark cellar
And in the dark dark cellar three skeletons lived!

I smiled grimly to myself. It was odd, poking through memories like that. I didn’t even know I remembered the intro to the 1992 kid’s show Funnybones until that moment.

Need to make tea. Nearly three O’ clock in the morning tea.

I prepared very milky tea in a mug first, and got as far as the foyer before I remembered I wasn’t making tea for Mum – that vibrant, chortling woman who gripped my hand so tightly when I crossed the road as a child – it was for mum, the wraith-like stranger who could not sit up any more, never mind safely hold a mug of hot liquid.

So I put it in a sippy cup, twisted the cap, positioned the straw. It felt macabre, handing it to her. How many times had she done the same for me when I was a baby.

‘That’s lovely,’ she said after a sip. ‘I’ve not had a cup of tea in ages.’

Despite my emotional turmoil, I felt…proud?

She fell asleep with the plastic cup propped up on her bony chest. I carefully took it, put it on the table beside her, and pressed the bed controls so she’d be in more of a lying position.

She made grumpy noises when I did so, but stayed sleeping. Her cold hands grasped for something, so I put Billy between them. Her leathery, sleepy smile was gentle.

I’ll be honest, when I slinked away to the sofa in the dining room, the first thing I did despite my absolute exhaustion was Google the name of my supposed father.

Mum had also mentioned a third man, someone she’d met at a pub, but she “didn’t think it was him”. For the sake of my emotional state, I chose to trust her on that one.

There were a good handful of blokes by his complete name, and even more with his first and last name. Ranging from scrap metal dealer all the way up to professor. Not a single one of them looked like me “around the mouth”, as my mother had put it.

I combed through whatever army enlistment records I could access, around the year of my birth. I did find a soldier with my possible father’s last name, and his first name, but the middle name was different. And then I found a lieutenant with the same name, but his first and second name were in the wrong order.

I found news articles of people with the same last name, reported on for doing nefarious things. I found notes on charity websites thanking the same last name for donations. I found men from Yorkshire, from London, from America, from Australia. I felt myself going insane as I scrolled through any mention, hoping for some tiny fragment that might link back to the part of York mum lived during the years she was…er, being “a bit of a lass”.

The whole time, my younger brother and I exchanged text messages. The poor guy was in a holiday caravan with his daughter and my aunt, struggling with food poisoning. He didn’t seem concerned by the idea I may be his half-sibling, but that may be because he was “absolutely fucked, and in a caravan” as he put it.

I don’t remember falling asleep, but I was woken by her yelling.

‘I’m in pain! I’m not right!’

Again, she “didn’t know what she wanted”. Again, she was curled up at the top of the mattress. Again, she’d kicked the duvet away but complained about being cold.

She was distressed, agitated, pissy with me. Every solution I suggested was met with anger. Every time I tried to hook my arms under hers and move her to a more comfortable position, she called out in pain.

So I called the district nurse again.

They arrived half an hour later, as the morning light bathed the lawn outside. It was almost six O’ clock.

I started having a panic attack the moment the pair of them came in. The older nurse sent the younger in to tend to my mother, and bustled me in to the kitchen.

‘What’s going on?’ She asked, with clinical but genuine concern.

The carers and nurses were already aware of my PTSD from my mother’s partner molesting me. That was a thread of information they had efficiently weaved between all the different nurses and carers who visited; each woman had asked if I was okay, if I was coping. Even so, this nurse was a little confused to hear about my recent revelation concerning the mystery of my biological father.

‘Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?’ She asked as I struggled to breathe.

‘I don’t know…I don’t know who I am…’ I managed. I felt like a child. I am absolutely not a child. But I was wearing my fluffy hat with the sheep ears and soft horns, so I expect it was a bit surreal for the poor woman.

‘I’m not happy leaving you,’ she said, ‘is there someone we can call?’

‘My dad,’ I grappled at my phone. ‘Well, if he is my dad…my dad…he’s a twenty-minute drive away…’

‘Let’s call him,’ she took my phone from me.

The speaker was set to quite loud, so I heard him when he picked up.

‘Wuuargh?’ His broad Yorkshire tone clipped into the warm air.

‘Hello,’ the nurse said, ‘this is one of the district nurses…’

‘Oh, yeah. Okay.’ He knew exactly what this meant.

Twenty minutes later, Dad bumbled into his ex-wife’s kitchen, eyes still wet from sleep.

The nurses gave mum another painkilling injection, and left. She settled down quickly, falling into a gentle sleep.

Dad didn’t want to go talk to mum. I suggested he not bother – she had no idea he had turned up, and I didn’t want him to see her as she was. It had been a good twenty years since he had clapped eyes on her. That was a thread long broken.

Even so, he sat in that kitchen and listened to me crying.

I think the last time he’d been in there was more than twenty years before; one Christmas he picked me up in the evening when mum was drunk. She kept calling me “little miss arsehole” with such vitriol and hatred, because of how withdrawn and quiet I always was.

Dad didn’t say much at the time, but I remember him looking at me concerned, and how he bustled me out of the house into his car. And I remember the silent drive back to his home while I cried into the window.

As the early sun fell lazily onto the medication-strewn kitchen table, Dad talked and listened. He hugged me. He told me he loved me, and how he would do whatever I needed when I’m ready.

‘You’ll do a DNA test?’ I asked meekly.

‘Yeah, of course.’

‘I’m going to think about it for a bit,’ I said. ‘Maybe until this whole thing with mum is over.’

‘I think that’s a very good idea.’

I told him the full name of my supposed father.

‘Oh, yeah,’ his face lit up in recognition. ‘They were a bunch of gypsies that lived down Walmgate.’

‘You’re joking?’ I asked, not bothering to correct him to “traveller”.

‘Yeah, they lived behind a bunch of shops.’

‘They put their caravans there?’

‘Well, they owned the shops.’

‘They ran businesses from there?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ He thought for a moment. ‘They’re running a recycling business now. I’ve seen the signs for it.’

It’s never been unusual to see travellers set up camp in parts of York. I often saw the horses grazing on roadsides when I was growing up. The thought that my biological father could have been living in a caravan (absolutely fucked, and in a caravan) while I slept in my own bedroom was…sobering, to say the least.

I made Dad a cup of tea. As is customary for him, he drank about 1/4^th of it and left the rest.

I smiled wryly as I poured the cup down the sink. This man will always be Dad. It doesn’t matter what happens. Any wanker can be a father. It takes much more than that to be a Dad.

Dad and I went for a walk, since mum was passed out. We stopped by a café and he bought me a latte and a weird sausage roll thing made to look like a steak bake with cranberries. My younger brother, still “absolutely fucked, and in a caravan” texted Dad concerned, so Dad took a photo of me and sent it with no caption. He showed me the photo afterwards; it was clear I had not slept properly in days.

“Rough,” my brother replied. He wasn’t wrong.

I let Dad go back home to sleep about 9am. Mum was still sleeping, so I went upstairs to rifle through some things.

My teenage bedroom had been emptied out, and was where The Man Who Is Not My Father had been sleeping up until he was moved into a care home. Mine and my younger brother’s things were shoved into the smaller bedroom. In the spare bedroom was The Man Who Is Not My Father’s office.

I’d already been in there a few times, as had my younger brother, trying to find some document or folder or scribbled password on mum’s behest. The man had a lot of stuff about boats. Boats he had sailed on, shipping details, a couple of diaries filled with numbers and charts I didn’t understand.

I crept into the main bedroom. Mum had previously been sleeping in there alone for a while, with lots of teddies wearing RNLI jumpers and years of dust.

I was surprised to see two shelves up over the bed, full of gifts and creations by my younger brother and I from our childhood.

A tacky model of a dolphin we had brought back from a holiday with Dad in France. Two little wooden totem poles we made in Design Technology at school. A little clay bowl I’d made as a seven-year-old, emblazoned with “I love you” in yellow paint, that for a while she used as an ash tray. A couple of tiny porcelain dolls I’d given her for some birthday long passed, and – oddly – a small model rocking horse Dad bought her soon after she left him.

Relics, coated in dust and cobwebs. Untouched for at least twenty years.

I pulled open drawers, sifted through boxes, desparate for some clue about my paternity. I don’t know what I was looking for – a photo? A love letter? I remember a big box full of photographs she had drunkenly gone through with me when I was in my early teens. I think I was looking for that. I was looking for Jack.

Instead, I found years of notes, shopping lists, scribbles about some puzzle in some strategy game; and a box that contained every single mention of me in the local paper, every flyer of every show I’d been in, every photo of me in every single stage role I ever played and every concert I sang at until she cut contact with me. The oldest example was from when I was ten years old; a poem published in a collection.

What happened, I thought. How did she go from being…obsessed with me…to not wanting to hear from me? Why did she suddenly want to protect The Man Who Is Not My Father so much?

My aunt, briefed by my brother, got an early bus to relieve me of caring duties, and I bumbled downstairs to let her in. She looked so concerned for me as I gave her the rundown on the last few days.

I handed her a packet of Minstrels.

‘Mum was going on about wanting Revels and Minstrels last night, so I got these for her. She’s asleep right now but might ask for them later.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Not really. I’m going home now.’

‘Are you okay to drive?’

‘I just have to get away from here.’

‘I understand. You know,’ she added, ‘I didn’t even know she was still talking to him when she says she…’

My aunt was talking about the bloke who is supposedly my father.

‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. This kind, funny woman had already tried to apologise for not knowing what had gone on with my mother’s now-husband, I didn’t want her feeling bad for mum being “a bit of a lass”.

I had to stop for a nap on my drive home outside a Burger King. I woke up twice, thinking mum was calling for me. I stared at the stitching on the steering wheel for the longest time.

Threads. Lines across a line.

19/04/2026

Thank you for reading. Louis x

CHAPTER SIX COMING SOON

Ironically, she’s got one of the more successfully treated types of cancer.

But because she is who she is, she suffered right through to stage four for years, ignoring symptoms and numbing the pain with alcohol. Not me, my brother, my half-brother or her sister had a clue what she was going through. My mother cut herself off from her own family and made The Man Who Is Not My Father her world.

For the last few years she was looking after him, or trying to, I suppose. After his stroke, he never got his brain back. Crippled in half by various hernias, he was barely able to get up the stairs.

I still haven’t been to visit him in the care home, where he’s been for the last few months; from what I understand, he is violent to the nurses and needs a team of four carers to keep him safe. Of course a tiny, miniscule part of me cares about such a constant figure from my childhood, but a larger part doesn’t especially want to be revictimised by a monster who probably wouldn’t recognise me anyway.

In any case, the woman lying in the poky hospital bed in her own living room was put there by her own actions. And she knows it too.

‘It was my decision,’ she told me sadly, holding on to her little stuffed bear. ‘I chose to get married to him. I chose to stay.’

She had a tough time looking me in the eye. I didn’t mind. I was slowly coming to see her as what she still is – a deeply traumatised woman let down by others just as much as she let down her children.

I’d come to stay for a few nights, to give my aunt respite. Mum was sad, I’d come to sit with her for a bit. Still confined to bed, she pinched at her duvet cover and shuffled on her pillow.

I glanced at the mantlepiece, where a vase of fresh flowers sat. I’d bought them for her on my way here, so she’d have something nice to look at from her bed. She’d been surprised, and pleased.

It was the afternoon by this point, I’d opened the curtains so she could get a bit of sunshine. It had been at least three days since she’d been able to sit up on her own.

‘The worst part was the colonoscopy,’ mum said after a silence.

‘Yeah,’ I said, fiddling with the cap of a water bottle. ‘I hear they aren’t much fun.’

‘It was because I was alone,’ she added quietly.

Well of course you were alone, I thought. When she had the scan a few months ago, the only one of us she was occasionally talking to was my brother D; and he hadn’t heard from her since a year before when he’d asked to move in during a tough time and she’d told him to piss off.

‘And I couldn’t talk to him about it,’ she said, meaning The Man Who Is Not My Father.

‘Oh, was he already…’ I spun my finger at my temple, ‘…by that point?’

‘He had been for a while. I told him I was scared about the appointment and he just…’ she shrugged. She looked so sad.

‘We would have come, if you’d have told us about it,’ I snipped. ‘Or, I mean, D certainly would have. Why didn’t you tell him?’

‘I don’t know,’ tears pooled in her eyes, and she held the little bear between her cold fingers. ‘When I was going in, I realised all I had was Billy.’

Who the fuck is…oh! She means the teddy bear.

That gave me a bit of a gut-punch, I have to say. This woman had no reason to cut all of us off outside of protecting The Man Who Is Not My Father. She’d seemingly arranged it so D and I would keep our half-brother J out of our lives, and have no relationship with our aunt or late uncle, because mum didn’t want word getting around about the molestation.

Off the back of that, J had his own childhood trauma ignored, and D struggled through raising his own little girl in a world where he automatically saw every male as a threat. The three of us had no support, no explanation when the bad things happened before we were old enough to understand. Everything was brushed so far under the rug that even now, while dying, this woman refused to pull it all back out.

But she didn’t deserve to go to a terrifying medical appointment with only a stuffed bear for moral support. Nobody deserves that.

‘I’m sorry that happened to you,’ I said. And I meant it.

She looked down at Billy. A softness crossed her face.

‘Thank you.’

Mum called out for me from about half ten at night. She didn’t shout my name – either my real one or the deadname she knew me by - just a mumbled statement.

I thought she was talking in her sleep at first. But when I perched near the door, I heard:

‘I’m desperate for a drink.’

I wandered into the darkness. The constant pump of the air mattress was soft, regular. Reassuring.

‘Alexa,’ I said, ‘turn on Lounge One.’

The Amazon assistant made a dinging noise.

The lamp in the far corner lit up.

There was a bottle of water and a sippy cup of juice on the table beside the bed, but it seemed she couldn’t roll over by herself any more. She was turned away towards the wall, hands bunched up against the flat of her chest.

‘Here’s your water,’ I said, reaching over her shoulder to give her the little bottle.

A long-nailed hand emerged from the duvet and struggled to grasp at the plastic. Her skin was so pale, so cold. She could barely hold the bottle up, I had to help her tilt it towards her mouth.

When I took the bottle back, she looked at me in the half-light. A look of recognition seemed to pass over her face.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You okay?’

She shuffled with irritation.

‘I need to put my knees with my knees,’ she said.

Oh. Okay.

‘You need to put your knees with your knees?’

‘Yes!’ She snapped, angry now. ‘I need to put my KNEES with my KNEES!’

I had literally no idea what this meant, so I sort of moved the blankets around a bit.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘you put your knees with your knees and I’ll make sure your duvet is right.’

She curled into a fetal position, arms wrapped around her knees. A pause. Her breathing slowed a little, face relaxed. Clearly, this was her knees with her knees.

‘I’m cold,’ she muttered.

With both radiators and a fan heater on full blast, the room felt hotter than the sun.

‘It’s quite warm in here, do you mean- ‘

‘I’M FREEZING.’

‘Okay, okay,’ I skipped over to each radiator and turned them down. Judging by how she pushed her duvet back down over her legs, she was confusing too cold with too hot. I’d already researched that part of terminal restlessness, frantically stabbing queries into my phone at gone 1am in exhausted desperation.

Soon after I quietly cranked open a window (she would have flipped out if she’d heard it), she calmed down. As the cool breeze passed over the bed, she fell into a muggy sleep.

That is, until fifteen minutes later when I was wandering into a muggy sleep of my own.

‘I’m not right,’ she called out. My body got to her bedside before my brain did.

‘Ummurgharbh?’ I asked. She looked at me.

‘You what?’

‘Sorry, did you call for me?’

‘Yeah. I can’t get comfy.’

Duvet discarded, she’d managed to bunch herself up at the very top of the bed, back pressed against the headboard, knees and thighs flush up against her withered stomach. One elbow was digging into the wall while the other was somehow tucked underneath her.

‘Do you want to stretch your legs out a bit?’ I asked, hands poised at the duvet edge.

‘Yeh.’

I carefully grabbed at her bare, emaciated ankles, and slowly pulled them down towards to end of the bed.

‘Is that better?’ I asked.

‘Yeh,’ she muttered, before pulling her knees back up to her belly.

I bit my lip. I must admit, it’s hard to keep your temper when; 1. You’re not a palliative carer and nobody told you that this symptom is normal; 2. You’ve had barely any sleep in the last three days; 3. The patient came back into your life when she decided she really, really needed you to help her and; 4. Said patient is partly responsible for how fucked up you’ve been most of your adult life.

One of the hospice nurses told me mum’s “not being able to get comfy” could mean a number of things. It could mean she’s too hot, too cold, she’s in pain, she’s thirsty, she’s hungry. Not unlike in a baby, mum’s brain told her she was “not right” and not bothering to offer much information after that.

‘Are you in pain?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she snapped.

I rifled through medicine bags in the kitchen and did her a full dose of oxycodone (painkiller) and a syringe of anti-sickness medication, just in case she was queasy and not able to articulate it. At this point, I was so knackered I’d have happily performed a one-man Hamlet show if it meant she’d let me sleep for an hour.

I handed her the plastic syringe. Her long-nailed hands didn’t seem to know where they were going. Trying to help, I put her fingers around the syringe and moved the end towards her mouth. The plastic tip almost popped into her nostril.

‘Oh!’ I laughed. ‘Sorry!’

‘I don’t want it in ma nose,’ she said, wrinkles around her smile creasing like crepe paper.

‘Here.’ I tried to guide her hand again. She pushed the syringe end directly into her own nostril.

‘Oi!’ I helped her pull it back down towards her mouth, ‘You just told me you didn’t want it in your nose! I’m getting mixed signals here!’

Her eyes closed into a slit as she chuckled wheezily, and she managed the get the whole syringe of medication down.

‘Ew, it’s gross,’ she muttered. ‘Alexa? Where’s my water.’

‘It’s here, what you asking Alexa for?’

‘I don’t know. I’m confuzzled.’

Confuzzled. That was one of the odd words and phrases she’d use when D and I were little. Like “toosipegs” for teeth, “fizzog” for face, “playing silly beggars” for anything not working properly, “daft apeth” for anyone being stupid, “is it ‘eckers like” if she didn’t believe some tall tale my brother or I were telling.

I can still hear her now, popping up into the flat on an evening to tell us to “brush us toosipegs and wash fizzog” before bed. How she tucked our little bodies under duvets, one of us on the other side of her king-size mattress and the other on a piss-stained camp bed beside.

I can remember how her breath smelled of Bacardi, and how the scent of her perfume lay at the duvet edge like a fading ghost as I drifted off to sleep.

Approaching 1am, I was dozing on the sofa in the dining room when I heard mum call out again.

‘Alexa’, then silence.

Usually, she would ask Alexa to turn on or off Lounge One or Two. Confused, I muted the audio of the show I was falling asleep to.

‘Alexa,’ she said again, with a little more urgency.

I got up and stood by the darkened living room door, hunched over like Nosferatu.

‘Alexa!’ She practically shouted.

‘Are you calling me Alexa?’ I said, wandering in.

‘Yes. No. I don’t know who anyone is anymore.’

‘It’s okay,’ I laughed, ‘I get days like that too.’

She did one of her cheeky chuckles. It was odd to see her actually being friendly with me, I’d only ever known her to practically hate the ground I walked on. I wondered if the medication was making her less of a bitch.

Not ten minutes later I heard the call again.

‘Alexa?’ Her voice was a soft creak, like a hinge in the rain.

Oh, she means me.

‘Alexa,’ she repeated, more firmly this time, ‘water.’

Oh. How Black Mirror.

‘Louis is here,’ I said, ‘and your water is right here.’

Mum struggled to open the cap, but managed.

‘I’m sick of this,’ she muttered.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I get overwhelmed too sometimes. Sometimes I can’t cope.’

‘My daughter Sarah is a bit like that,’ she muttered, without smiling.

That’s when I realised: she’d been so chirpy and calm with me because she didn’t know I was Sarah. She didn’t even know – or had forgotten - I go by Louis now.

She thought I was a St Leonard’s Hospice carer called Alexa.

I watched her as she fell into a fitful sleep.

‘I love you,’ I muttered.

Even as I said it, I didn’t know if it was true. I knew I loved Mum, that woman from my distant memory and my dreams and the fantasies I’d had about some soft kind woman keen to gossip and go for coffee and hear all about what I’ve been up to.

But it wasn’t Mum in that bed. It was mum.

She said nothing, but brought her knees further up into herself.

Tears in my eyes, I watched the day’s first rays of sunlight shine onto the ceiling.

In the late evening, I gave her some lorazepam and painkiller. It calmed her a lot, and she became very chatty with me. She wanted to talk about biscuits, her favorite chocolate.

Since she was in a good mood, and I was in need of self-medicating, I poured myself a glass of wine. It was so nice to just talk to my mum, to have a good chat about absolutely nothing. I soaked up every moment of her high spirits.

‘Gimmie my phone,’ she said at one point, ‘I can’t remember the name of that really good chocolate.’

I watched as she prodded an invisible screen a few inches to the left of her phone screen. She didn’t know what she was doing, but she was happy.

My half-brother J had been over in the afternoon. Mum had dozed through his visit. After ten years not seeing me and fifteen not seeing her, J struggled with the sight of the emaciated woman in the hospital bed.

‘I need to get my head around this,’ he muttered, in the kitchen afterwards. Thankfully his wife came along with him; I can’t imagine how awful that bus ride back into York would have been if he were on his own.

‘He was hard to deal with,’ Mum said now, putting her phone down, ‘J was really hard to deal with when he was a kid.’

Well, yeah. Mum had packed J up and fled his abusive father when he was barely eight. The poor lad had seen his father beating her up. In the short time I spoke to him during his visit, it was clear those punches were still felt forty years later.

She started talking. A lot. About the struggles of the abusive marriage, about bringing up a damaged child. About being so young and scared of the man who is supposed to love you. I listened and I sipped wine and I handed her fruit pastilles when she asked.

Then:

‘While we’re talking about secrets,’ mum said with a wry smile on her face, ‘I may as well tell you. Nobody knows this.’

I braced myself for something daft; maybe she’d lied about liking all the bullshit craft projects my brother and I brought her as children. Maybe she had some money secured away somewhere. Maybe she still had feelings for my father.

It was none of those things.

‘[My dad’s name] isn’t Sarah’s dad,’ she said matter-of-factly.

I felt a cold wave wash over me. My glass of wine was halfway towards my mouth. It froze there.

‘He isn’t Sarah’s dad?’ I repeated, buying my brain time to digest.

‘No,’ mum said. She was being absolutely erudite. I recognised the look from my childhood, when she would reminisce about happy memories.

After a pause, I asked:

‘Who is her father, then?’

‘They called him Jack. Because he was a Jack the Lad,’

She was grinning now. I could see her gums, a happy twinkle in her eye.

‘He was a jack the lad? Or jack of all trades?’

‘Both,’ she nodded. ‘He was a real charmer. Tall, blonde hair. He was an absolute stunner.’

She still thinks I’m Alexa, I reasoned internally. If I’m going to get anything out of her, I need to keep calm and reasonable.

‘So,’ I asked levelly, ‘you were cheating on [my dad]?’

‘Well, you know how they say someone is “a bit of a lad”?’

‘Of course,’ I replied.

‘Well…I was “a bit of a lass,”’

She chuckled gently.

She didn’t marry Dad until a year after I was born. I’d often wondered why that was the case. And honestly, I’d often wondered whether I was my dad’s kid; I’ve got the dark under eyes, but so did my mother’s dad.

‘So, you were having a good time, basically,’ I said, swallowing hard.

‘Ooo, yeah. There is one other bloke it could be, but I don’t think so.’

‘Why do you think Jack is the one?’

‘It’s the eye,’ she said, now bringing a fruit pastille to her mouth. ‘Jack had it. Sarah’s got the same thing. The eye that doesn’t work.’

I felt a bit sick.

‘He was 19,’ she added. ‘He was a real charmer. I met him through my sister.’

She would have been about 28 when I was conceived.

‘Did [my dad] know?’

‘Yeah. I even said to him, how do you know this baby is yours? But he …brushed it under the rug. That’s what he does.’

She wasn’t wrong. Knowing my dad as I do, I’m certain he did that.

‘Did you tell Jack?’

‘Oh, nooooo. He left to join the army a while later.’ She paused to muse a little, then smiled warmly. ‘But then me and [my dad] had D, and he and Sarah looked so alike when they were little. There’s a photo I took of them both in the bath, and they could have been twins.’

I know the photo she was talking about. I confiscated it from The Man Who Is Not My Father’s briefcase after I broke into it, aged 22. I still don’t know what it was doing in there. I don’t really want to think too hard about it.

‘Do they look alike, Sarah and Jack?’ I asked. I could feel my eyes burning with tears aching to come.

‘Just around the mouth,’ mum said thoughtfully.

‘Don’t you think you should tell her?’

Her mood changed like a switch.

‘No.’

‘I think you should,’ I pressed with some restraint. ‘I think she should know.’

‘No, I can’t. Anyway, let’s stop talking about Sarah, let’s stop talking about Sarah.’ She flapped her hands as if flapping at a fly. ‘Did you find the Mini Rolls?’

I sat and watched her eat the Mini Roll, my heart beating hard in my chest. She was really enjoying it. She looked calm, happy.

‘You know what,’ she said through a mouth of cake, ‘It’s so good to get things off your chest, isn’t it?’

During an ebb in mum’s ensuing soliloquy about chocolate and cakes and biscuits, I dipped out to my car promising to be back in a few minutes. She didn’t question it; she was too busy poking through a tube of fruit pastilles.

Dad picked up after a few rings.

‘Yeaaurgh?’ It was 2am. He must have been asleep a good few hours already.

‘Dad,’ I gripped the steering wheel with my free hand, and tried to keep my voice calm. ‘Mum has just said I might not be yours.’

He spluttered a little, then paused.

‘Well, there was a young guy sniffing round about the time she got pregnant…’

‘You’re fucking kidding me?’ I nearly screamed. ‘She said there was some nineteen-year-old she was seeing?’

‘Yeah, there was. He kept pursuing her.’

Oh my god. Oh my god. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.

‘But you’re my dad!’ I shouted. ‘You are my dad! You’ve always been my dad!’

Not one to regulate my emotions easily, I quite frankly freaked the fuck out. I’m telling you, I don’t think in my life I have had such a crash out – it was tantrum-levels, the violent swinging and screeching of an overgrown toddler.

Thankfully mum’s house is surrounded by fences and bushes, so likely no-one saw my car shaking and bumping about as I punched and kicked the doors, dashboard, my own body.

Dad confirmed all that she had told me, aside from the assertion that I wasn’t his kid.

‘I never wondered,’ he said while I sort of curled up into a ball of pain in the footwell. ‘Well, sometimes I did. But then when you were growing up I saw how much you looked like my brother, or my mum. I never thought you weren’t mine.’

It took a while for me to calm down.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I breathed eventually. I felt like someone had clipped my anchor chain. I felt so incredibly lost and scared and upturned.

‘Whatever you want to do, I’ll support you. If you want to go down the DNA route, we can do that. But really, it doesn’t matter. It won’t change anything.’

I knew that. Despite how much he struggled as a single parent, and how angry he used to get, he was always there for us. He still was there – why else would he pick up the phone at gone 2am?

But I felt heartbroken. This was painful, the weight on my chest was unbearable. I’d worked so hard in the previous years to get past the subconscious fear that my own dad wanted to do to me what The Man Who Is Not My Father had done, we’d only just started hugging and telling each other we love each other. And now this?

I actually sniggered to myself a little when I thought of what I subconsciously call my mother’s partner. Now I had a Man Who Is Not My Father…and a Man Who Might Not Be My Father as It Turns Out. And a Man Who Might Be My Father and Has No Clue I Exist.

And if so, then I didn’t have a half-brother and a brother, now. I had two half-brothers. And maybe more half-siblings? An entire family? Who were they? Were they good people? Or bastards? Would it make sense at my age to even bother connecting with them?

Exhaustion washed over me.

‘You’re okay,’ Dad said. He sounded exhausted too. ‘You’re okay, love, we’ll work it out.’

I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.

I don’t know who I am.

13/04/2026

Thank you for reading. Louis x

Not maliciously – she was in pain, she needed moving around, she needed me to call the district nurse for injections since she couldn’t hold her phone herself. The terminal restlessness drove her mad.

D and my aunt came over on the third morning, knowing I was getting into a bit of a state. I’d started hallucinating my mother calling my name and my deadname, I couldn’t nod off even when they went to tend to her. In the end, I collapsed on the landing, my blanket around me like a cape.

The anger. The anger was overwhelming. The anger at him, The Man Who Is Not My Father. That moment he started doing weird things to a little girl, a gourd-y root penetrated my brain, plunged into soft pink earth only to thrive still thirty years later.

Every relationship, every interaction with an older male; every opportunity wasted by my severe depression; every promising career move cancelled by panic attacks or catatonia; every instance of revictimisation and times men took my body as if it were theirs; I blamed it all on him, a man who wasn’t suffering like my mother. He was safely in a nursing home, brain a fried egg, cheerfully sipping soup.

It wasn’t fair.

Horrible noises were coming from somewhere. They sounded like the roars of a dying animal. It was only when my brother bundled up the stairs and tried to coax me out of earshot of the newly-arrived carers, I realised the noises were coming from me.

I started hitting myself on the forehead. I started slamming my skull into the wall behind me. I started crying out for my Dad.

Wordlessly, D bundled me into his car and drove twenty minutes to our Dad’s home. He was somewhat surprised to see his daughter, shoeless, wearing only tights and vest under a draped blanket, being hustled into the living room by his son.

‘Oh,’ he said, shrugging his oily work jacket off and exhaling heavily, ‘right.’

I had to get a lift home that night. I was in no state to drive. I felt like my heart was split in two. I watched the motorway go by through tears, and mused how I’d rather have physical pain than this kind.

As I fell asleep in my own, unmade bed, I thought I heard her voice. The Mum from my childhood, with the laugh like ice cubes in a glass. I smelled her perfume; I felt her cold hands on my face.

After two nights at home, I came back to give my aunt a rest and take over care. When I arrived, my mother was too weak to talk. She did smile when I stroked her hair though.

‘Hi Mum. It’s Sarah. Or Louis.’

Normally, only my Dad is allowed to call me my deadname. I’ve extended that privilege to mum because she gets confused easily.

I oversaw the delivery of a special mattress. Two burly men piled it out of a van full of them and into the house’s hallway. Afternoon sun washed into the room when I pulled open the curtains.

‘Where is this going?’ The younger one asked. He looked like he had just wandered in from a darts tournament at the local.

‘Er, the bed’s in there but…’

He pushed open the living room door and was greeted by the view of my dying mother in her incontinence pants and baggy black shirt, kicking the duvet from her skeletal legs in a half-stupor.

‘Oof,’ he recoiled, pulling the door to.

‘…but I’m waiting for the carers to come and help me move her from the old mattress.’ I finished.

The hospice nurses arrived a minute or so later, bustled into the living room and got my mother under her duvet.

‘We’ve got your new mattress here Kay,’ the same ethereally pretty carer whom I had sobbed about the molestation to, said as she unzipped her fleece jacket. The room was boiling. ‘It’s to help you with your sore skin.’

‘I’m tired,’ my mother muttered from under the thick duvet. I watched helplessly as the two blokes unfurled the floppy skin of the new mattress; an air bed attached to a big white computer-controlled pump via thick umbilical.

The younger bloke hooked the computer on to the end of the occupied bed frame and pressed a couple of buttons, pointedly keeping his eyes at a low angle.

‘It will fully inflate in about half an hour,’ he mumbled, before he and his colleague hustled out of the house and into the fresh sunlight, heads bowed.

Did it bollocks inflate in about half an hour.

The carers started changing mum’s pants and freshening her up. She was making grumpy, tired noises. Thus far I’d done a good job of avoiding seeing my mother’s naked arse, but I got more than enough of a picture in my peripheral vision when I handed the carers a bottle of shower gel.

‘Ooo, this gel smells nice Kay,’ the younger carer said. She turned it in her plastic-gloved hand to read the label. ‘Summer rose and raspberry!’

‘Oh, lovely,’ the older carer, a woman perhaps a little younger than my mother, said while she gently dabbed mum’s hip with a flannel. ‘Is it an M and S one?’

Mum’s tumour was so big it was pushing out of her backside hole. Her coccyx was sore and enflamed, the points of her back where skin meets mattress were red and mottled.

I prodded despondently at the deflated puddle on the carpet, swallowing back the bile that had risen in my throat.

‘I don’t think it’s going up, is it.’

‘It is taking a long while,’ the older carer replied, glancing up from wiping mum’s face with a warm cloth. ‘We might have to wait till we come back later. Only they’re allowed to set it up, though,’ she added, meaning the two blokes who had brought it over, ‘So if it’s not sorted in about an hour can you give them a ring?’

They got mum comfy on the old mattress and left. While she wheezed quietly in her sleep, I thought fuck it and googled troubleshooting. It turned out whichever bloke connected the new mattress up hadn’t turned a plastic valve the lock position, causing a pressure leak.

I’ve got to say, I felt pretty damn smug as I watched the purple vinyl firm up.

With another few hours before the carers would return and mum sleeping soundly, I had a cheeky go on the new mattress myself.

Made to prevent bed sores for bedbound patients, it’s made of a load of little air cushions that inflate or deflate at intervals. The white computer pump unit offered a few modes which yes I had a go on. Ones offering a firmer feel, a more frequent rearranging of pressure, a softer feel.

I was lying there staring at the ceiling, listening to the sound of the pump whirring when I realised how utterly macabre this was. Here I was in a stuffy room that smelled of gas and Charlie body spray, my dying mother sleeping nearby, and I was getting excited about a gadget that would stop her bed sores from getting worse.

Years and years ago, I would walk into this room any time after 10pm and see my mother and The Man Who Is Not My Father, one sat on the sofa and one in an armchair, watching TV under dim light. The room would stink of alcohol. Special Brew for her, Skol Super for him.

A room that was once filled with my mother’s cackling, tipsy laughter and the bright buzz of TV shows was silent but for the whirr of a mattress pump. I could hear birds twittering outside, cars in the distance, a neighbour calling for her kids.

Hot sunshine pressed through the curtains. I watched it creep over the dusty carpet for a moment, then went back to my sofa in the dining room to chase a nap.

She was awfully grumpy when the carers came back in the evening to move her onto the new mattress.

‘Leave me alone,’ she muttered from a foetal position. ‘I’m too tired.’

‘It won’t take a minute, Kay,’ the older carer said. She had the brightest blue eyes I’ve ever seen, and kind wrinkles at her temples.

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Mum,’ I say carefully, ‘this will make your back stop hurting so much, and you’ll be able to sleep a lot better. And then I’ll be able to sleep better,’ I added wistfully. ‘With all three of us helping you we’ll get it sorted out before you know it.’

She was still grumpy but she conceded.

I rolled the commode in from the foyer, clipped the plastic flat over the bowl. The nurses got her sat up through a combo of pressing bed controls and wincing through mum’s calls of pain. She wasn’t able to move her limbs much as we shifted her gently on to the commode seat.

Good God, her legs were so thin. The skin was hanging off her thighs, her knees looked comically big in comparison. They were like the legs of a cartoon character, some short-wearing schoolkid in Beano or Dandy.

We pulled the old mattress from the metal bedframe, and all three of us struggled to get the new one on. The umbilical connecting the computerised pump to the airbed wrapped around the bed leg.

‘Do you want a freshen up while you’re here, Kay?’ The carer with the bright eyes asked while I wrapped a sheet onto the new mattress. Mum was so exhausted she could barely even nod.

As the night drew into early hours, mum started to suffer. She rolled on her back, knees up, pushing the thick duvet down over her pants. Her long nails plucked and pinched at the soft edge where the stoma bag was tucked, and where they were a little too tight around the thigh.

‘I’m in so much pain,’ she moaned.

‘I can’t give you any more of your medicine right now, it’s not been enough time.’

A syringe of oxycodone. I was allowed to give it to her by mouth every four hours, providing she hadn’t had her lorazepam sedative within the hour.

She moaned at me.

‘I don’t care.’

‘Do you want me to call the district nurse?’

We’d already talked about this; another late-night visit for pain and the district nurse was bound to prescribe her a syringe driver. That’s a type of canular that constantly administers pain relief.

‘Whatever,’ she snipped.

I recognised that tone. She did want me to call the district nurse, she didn’t want to admit to it.

I didn’t tell her that once the syringe driver goes in, it’s not going to come out until she passes. She still thought she was going to get better. With aching eyes, I grimly pressed the number into my phone.

Half an hour later a nurse rifled through boxes of medicines on the kitchen table, pulled a vial of something into a syringe and woke my mother from her fitful sleep.

‘Shall we inject this in your leg or arm?’ the nurse asked clinically.

‘Don’t care, whatever,’ my mother moaned.

Afterwards, I sat beside the bed with my hand on her bony shoulder. She wheezed, barely heard over the hum of the fan heater and the bed pump.

In that moment, I just wanted Mum. I just wanted my Mum.

I wanted that woman with the laugh like ice cubes in a glass, the crimped hair, the makeup so thick you could smell it.

I wanted that woman who strode into town in a leather jacket and stiletto heels, gripping the hand of my little brother’s pushchair while four-year-old me toddled beside. I remember the men turning as she passed, staring at her face, her breasts, the sway of her hips.

She was an icon of independent, feminine motherhood; strong and serene and smiling. She was a Madonna. An oil painting. An icon with big breasts, big brain and even bigger heart. She was painted in vibrant swipes and swirls, sounds and smells.

Now, she lay crumpled on cold-framed bed. Dry, forgotten. She was sun-bleached, faded, drained of almost everything but the bones.

I suppose The Man Who Is Not My Father did that. I don’t suppose he meant to.

But surely, a woman who had already been through the trauma of an abusive older man at such a young age, finding out the one she left her second husband for had cheated with her little daughter?

How can anyone be a holy Madonna after that? Unless Jesus is pain. Unless Jesus is coffee splattered up walls and cup fragments in carpets, or angry looks across the dinner table, or a frantic search for my pants when she woke me to wee and saw I was fully naked.

‘Where are your pants?’ She demanded, grabbing my eight-year-old shoulder and shaking it roughly. I’d been in a deep sleep and didn’t know what she was on about. She smelled of Bacardi and coke and makeup and perfume, and looked like she was about to cry.

I’d kicked my pants off during the night. They were a little too tight around the thigh.

When I pulled them from the slip between the camp bed and the wall, she stopped talking, looked abashed, yanked them up over my spindly legs and pulled me over on to the plastic potty.

She got dark towards me after the whole incident. She got snippy. She never seemed impressed with my grades or my stories. She was angry at me. She resented me for being the ‘other woman’ – an eight-year-old girl.

The day-shift district nurse appeared at about 8am. She was a kind, motherly woman who looked on me with real concern.

She brought a medium storage box from her car. Numbly, I watched her pull out some contraption, about the size of an original Game Boy, press some buttons, and clip it into a transparent plastic case. A red sticker on the side read “LOANED TO ST LEONARD’S HOSPICE.”

After the nurse left, I put the newly-installed syringe driver box on the bedside table and made sure the long canular tube wasn’t caught under the pillow. Mum started to sleep soundly.

I stood at the end of the bed as the sunlight creeped from the closed curtains, across the dusty carpet again. I must have been there ten minutes, watching her chest rise and fall, emotions and memories whirring through my body.

Then back into the dining room I went to pass out on the sofa.

11/04/2026

‘Louis!’

I fell off the sofa, scrambled for a shirt, yanked it over my head while leaving the room. When I creaked open the living room door, I winced at soft lamplight.

That smart bulb that was knackered. The one she told me about when I first came to visit her. Working again, apparently.

‘I need to sit up,’ she said, too weak to look up at me. I shuffled the walker frame away from the bed, put my hand around her forearm. My middle finger and thumb met as I pulled her upright.

She leaned forward, head hovering over the duvet.

‘I feel really sick,’ she muttered.

I fumbled blearily for the ant-sickness medication and filled the plastic syringe. She didn’t say anything, just propped the tip into her mouth and pushed.

‘Thank you,’ she offered meekly. She sat almost curled over, bony elbow on the knee under the thick duvet, fingers running through her hair gently. Even in the dim light I could see how purplish they were.

They’ve always been such cold fingers. When I was little, she complained about bad circulation that made them so icy. But when I was sick and lying in bed, feverish and queasy, waking up to that chilly smoky palm pressing on my forehead was such a comfort.

I settled her as best I could. She seemed to be nodding off in that curled over position, not responding to my queries around whether she wanted to, you know, be moved from that curled over position, so I went back to the squishy old sofa in the next room.

Maybe twenty minutes later, I heard her calling in my dream again.

‘Louis!’

Again I bundled through the living room door. She was still hunched over.

‘I can’t get comfy,’ my mother told me, from possibly the most uncomfortable-looking pose ever.

Again, I moved the walker aside, and shuffled the little table with her phone and half-drank cups on it. After I helped her decide what buttons to press to make the bed be where she wanted it, I squatted down and looped my arms under hers to pull her back up the mattress.

‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘that’s lovely’.

Shortly after I was woken by another call.

‘Louis!’

We didn’t need the smart bulb turned on this time. The first slips of morning sun were poking through the curtain rails.

‘I can’t get comfy,’ she said, ‘I’m not right.’

Again, I shuffled the walker away from the bed.

All the way till quarter to nine in the morning, I was roused from almost sleep by my dying mother at regular intervals. She was restless, a little agitated, couldn’t find the right position to rest in. Sometimes she wanted to be sat up and left alone, then helped to lay back down.

‘What part of you is uncomfy?’ I asked, exhausted.

She paused for a moment, before replying:

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.’

It wasn’t her fault. It’s a symptom of the disease, near the end.

‘I never thought I’d end up like this,’ she said grimly.

I didn’t know what to do. I pulled the little table away from the bed, slipped in-between, and stroked her back for a while.

Ribs. Just ribs. No muscle, barely a layer of skin. It was like running my fingers along a fence.

‘I’m so proud of you,’ I told her. And I meant it.

There was a long, long pause. I wondered if I had overstepped. I think the last time the woman and I had touched was the last time she held my hand as a child.

‘Thank you,’ she replied eventually.

Later, the two visiting Macmillan carers saw how shattered I was, and told me to go for a nap while they helped my mother with her pant pads. She wanted a wash and freshen up. I ran some hot and cold water into a plastic basin and took it into the living room.

I tried not to look at what was happening on the bed.

Why was I doing this? The principle? Some sense of moral superiority?

I thought about it, lying on the sofa again after the carers left. I thought it might be because I would want my children to do the same for me. But then, I wouldn’t have cut my children off for more than a decade to protect my partner, who during that time would become a husband. And I wouldn’t have left the glaring symptoms of cancer for six years before finally getting care.

But that’s me, and that’s my mother. Two people who don’t knew each other at all.

She seemed to rest easier in the day, though not by much. She didn’t ask for food, and her rest was fitful.

My mind was in turmoil. The flashbacks haunted me, but seeing her so sad was making me sad too.

I called the palliative care nurse to ask after an injection that would help mum settle. A sedative; there was a bag of them and a few other preparatory medications, sitting on the dusty hi-fi system in the living room. They weren’t to be administered by anyone other than a nurse, though.

The lady on the phone said she would ask the carers if my mum was ready for them yet. She would call back.

At one point, I went outside to tidy up my car. I left mum listening to her too loud York Mix FM and leafing at a newspaper. She wasn’t taking in the words, just looking at the pictures.

I rang Dad.

‘Dad,’ I began, then the emotions poured out.

‘Oh, love,’ Dad said. ‘What’s up?’

I could barely talk for sobbing. I’d been awake 24 hours but for maybe ten- or 20-minutes sleep, and was looking after a woman who I did not know how to communicate with.

I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn’t want to say it to mum. I wanted to say it to Mum – the woman she was before the incident nearly thirty years ago.

That woman who wore bright blush and red lippy. That woman who would stride in to town wearing stiletto heels and low-cut top while pushing my little brother, D, in his pram. That woman had a laugh that sounded like ice cubes jingling in a glass, and a smile like a slip of sunlight emerging from the edge of an eclipse.

She was in there somewhere, Mum. I hadn’t seen her for nearly 15 years, but she’d peeked from mum’s body many a time in the years before. When she wiped away tears while I sang her opera tunes, when she dragged D and I out shopping and we got little tins of Power Rangers lemonade from Woolworths. I used to hang over the banister at night, straining to hear her excitedly tell her partner about the new chapter of the book 12-year-old me had written.

The woman on the bed in that house was mum. Not Mum. She was that crochety, guarded woman who didn’t care about anyone, especially not herself.

While I was blubbing on the phone to Dad, I got a call from mum. I ended my call and bundled inside.

‘Someone’s just called me,’ she said. ‘Wanting to know about me being in pain?’

I grimaced. For some reason, the palliative care worker I’d talked to on the phone rang mum rather than me. So now she was confused, because it wasn’t pain she was in. And she really didn’t like me trying to arrange things without telling her.

I thought about saving her sense of pride. But then I thought: fuck it.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘They weren’t supposed to call you, obviously. I was asking about maybe getting you something so you can settle down a bit. I know you’re not in pain.’

‘Well I’m not in pain,’ mum snipped.

‘I know,’ I replied. I knew she was lying, but that’s always been her. For some reason, she’d stay suffering and get pissy at people for pointing out that suffering.

I couldn’t help it. I started crying. I felt like a child again, I couldn’t control it.

She looked at me properly. I swear I saw it – I saw Mum show up behind those eyes. It was like she became a different person.

‘What’s the matter?’ She asked, genuinely concerned.

I couldn’t talk for a moment. I was choking on sobs and sniffling too much. Then I said what I’d wanted to for the last decade and half.

‘I missed you so much,’ I sobbed.

Her face softened. Her eyebrows raised, maybe surprised? For a moment I wondered if the usual mum would shake me off like she always used to.

‘I missed you too, love,’ My Mum replied, her voice full of emotion. ‘I really did, love.’

‘Then why this?’ I banged my palm on the end of the bed, ‘Why have you not talked to me for this long?’

‘I don’t know, love,’ She really sounded like she meant it. There were tears pooling in her eyes. Then, after a long pause: ‘Has the last ten or ‘summat years really been that hard for you?’

I thought about the rape by a co-worker. Then the one from a boyfriend. The year I spent drinking two bottles of wine a night. The man in London who coerced me into his car and assaulted me. The times I called her home number and no one answered. The suicide attempt, the days and weeks and months wasted festering in a deep pit of depression and spending so long in bed I started to develop sores.

‘Yes,’ I managed. ‘Because…the PTSD.’

She stared at me. It was Mum. She was devastated.

‘I so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry.’

I knew what she was apologising for. She was apologising for her partner, how now-husband: The Man Who Is Not My Father.

‘I forgive you Mum,’ I sobbed.

‘Do you?’

‘I do, Mum. I would have before; we could have worked through it. So many times in my life I’ve needed you. I would have done anything.’

‘I know love, I really am so sorry.’

We started to talk. Actually, properly talk. About how life doesn’t come with an instruction manual, how we all make decisions we think are right at the time.

I told her about my first relationship, how it was abusive. Mum had actually met him a good many times, it was before the near fifteen-year silence.

‘I knew he was,’ she muttered with anger. ‘I could tell he was.’

‘He only hit me once,’ I reassured her. ‘But it was the psychological abuse.’

She nodded sagely. She understood exactly.

‘Because,’ I continued, ‘I think it was Dad who told me, J’s father was like that.’

J is my half-brother. He was nearly 9 when I was born, I think.

The old mum would have been pissed off that I knew about her first marriage. She would have shut down any conversation around it.

But this Mum, this dying woman, nodded solemnly.

‘Yeah,’ she said. Then, ‘Yeah’, in a tone hanging with the weight of PTSD.

Mum was 19 when she gave birth to her first husband’s child. That man was, to be frank, a piece of shit. Off the bat, too – because he was almost forty with a family of his own.

He saw a vulnerable young woman with low self-esteem and he preyed on her. And he beat her. And he stopped her having friends, he wouldn’t let her get a job, he would make her beg for money to buy nappies for his baby.

‘This is what they do,’ I interjected when she started looking a bit angry at her teenage self, ‘they make you feel like you have to rely on them.’

‘Yep,’ she asserted.

‘And that without them, you are nothing. That’s how they control you.’

‘Yep!’ She said it louder this time. Way louder than I expected to hear from such a frail frame.

This was the first time she ever talked to me about this guy. I felt kind of privileged. The parallels between her first relationship and mine were frightening. I was lucky to get out of mine without a baby, but she stayed for J. Until one day, when J was about 6, she waited for her then-husband to go to work, bundled as much of her things together, took J’s hand and ran.

‘I had to,’ she told me, holding her little teddy bear now. ‘He had got violent. Really, really violent. I had to protect J. I had to do it.’

I was so proud of her for telling me. I knew this was the first time she was opening up about the trauma. It made me angry at that man, it made me wish I had been there to protect her.

Then we got talking about One Foot In The Grave. How Victor Meldrew seems more relatable the older you get. That episode in the car when Victor puts in a cassette tape to hear car mechanics singing a lament about him.

And my master’s degree from Cambridge, which I was awarded a couple of years ago. She grinned widely. And it’s a distinction, the highest grade!

Too weak to clap, she pressed her thumb and forefingers together a few times. So cute.

And her sailing adventures. How she and The Man Who Is Not My Father navigated a force nine gale around the coast of Wales on their little yacht, how the pair of them were so well-tuned they didn’t need to communicate while pulling the ropes and unfurling sails.

‘Sounds like you were really in sync,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘The others at the marina would watch us in awe, casting off not saying a word to each other.’

I realised then – she had forgiven him for what he had done. And she loved him.

And I didn’t hate her for that. I liked seeing her smiling.

She asked me to move her maybe every twenty to forty minutes up to the carer’s final visit of the day, at 9pm. She was softer in her tone. Every time I went to move her, Mum looked at me and asked ‘are you okay, love?’

After the carers changed her and got her comfy, I asked the one who was a nurse to administer the sedatives.

‘She’s really restless,’ I insisted, ‘She can’t get comfy.’

‘I understand,’ the nurse replied clinically, ‘but we can’t give the sedative unless we see evidence that it’s needed.’

‘Yes, but when people visit, she gets a bit chatty. Then when you go, she’s calling for me every ten minutes because she can’t get comfy.’

‘I understand it’s hard,’ the nurse continued, ‘but we would need to see her shuffling, saying she doesn’t know what she wants- ‘

‘She says that constantly,’ I interjected. ‘That she doesn’t know what she wants.’

‘Okay, but we need to see it.’

‘Well, if I call the district nurse tonight, are you saying when they come over and she’s not literally saying she doesn’t know what she wants and shuffling like she has all day, they won’t give the sedative so she can finally sleep? I mean you can see she’s exhausted.’

‘They will assess her,’ the nurse replied.

I was getting frustrated, so I thanked her and let her get on.

‘Would it help if your table is taller?’

I was trying anything I could think of. Since she ‘didn’t know what she wanted’, it was a tough call. But her drink of water and phone and sippy cup being on a table shorter than the bed certainly wasn’t helping given how low energy.

‘Maybe,’ mum said, grouchily.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ I leaned towards her conspiratorially, ‘what if we replace this table here with that bedside table you’ve got upstairs? Then you can reach things easier on your own.’

‘Aye, yeah.’ A pause. ‘But we need to wait for D to come over and bring it down.’

‘Er, Why?’

‘Well ‘cos he can carry it down fine.’

‘Mum, I’m pretty sure I can carry a bedside table.’

‘It’s very heavy.’

‘Is it though?’

‘Well you can try if you blummin’ well want.’ Ah yes, that snippy tone I remember so well.

I went upstairs. After five minutes of trying to shuffle a heavy table with drawers full of gubbins, I came back down.

‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘We need to wait for D.’

Mum’s knowing, smug look was filled with such cheekiness, it was adorable.

Later when D came over for a short check-in, Mum sent him upstairs (although not before relaying the story of me asserting I could get the bedside table down myself). He made a big show of carrying it on his shoulder like a lumberjack.

‘Friggin’ prick,’ I muttered.

She was so pleased with how much easier it was to reach her things. ‘Dead chuffed’, as she would put it.

‘Good job you’ve got a strong son,’ D said, flexing his arms in my direction.

‘Oh, piss off,’ I muttered. Mum was hunched over and rubbing her forehead again, but she was smiling.

From midnight onwards, she called me in to her dark room to move her around. Sometimes she wanted sitting up, sometimes she just ‘didn’t feel right.’

Eventually at about 4am she admitted it.

‘I’m sorry, but I’m in agony here,’ Her voice roused me from a very shallow slumber. ‘Louis!’

She’d not mentioned pain before. I put two and two together: she had been waiting out this entire time not admitting the pain she was in. Because that’s what she always did.

I could see in the half-light that she had kicked her blankets down, and was slouched with her knees up, gently squirming.

‘Okay,’ I put my hand on her knee, ‘On a scale of one to ten, ten being childbirth, what pain are we talking here?’

‘A seven, or an eight,’ she grimaced.

Oh shit. Okay. Right.

I called the district nurse, practically begging for them to come help with her pain and restlessness. A half hour later, two women bundled in and prepared injections.

‘Am I okay to put the injection in your leg?’ the especially clinical one asked.

‘I don’t care, wherever.’ Mum really was in pain.

She calmed down quickly. After they left, I put my hands under her bony arms to drag her further up the bed, then messed with the bed controls till we found the position she was comfiest.

‘Are you okay?’ She asked blearily.

‘You’re a pillock,’ I said. ‘You should just say when you’re in pain, don’t try to hide it.’

‘I know,’ she muttered. ‘But I’ve got to be strong.’

‘No, you’ve got to stop being a pillock.’

She smiled a little.

‘It’s hard,’ she mumbled, ‘I’ve been a pillock all my life.’

Pillock is a Yorkshire term. It means idiot.

Mum slept soundly for about an hour before she woke up and called for me. In the interim I got no sleep.

I called the district nurse again. She wasn’t able to come over until about 7.30am. In the meantime, I rearranged my mother best I could. She was restless, her skin was going grey.

When the district nurse finally arrived, she agreed Mum needed a higher dose of the sedative and more painkiller too. She said Mum looked ‘very, very poorly.’

Mum settled after the injections. I watched from the end of the bed as her eyelids drooped, head relaxed back into the pillow. The poor thing finally fell into a deep sleep.

The district nurse took me back into the kitchen, where she wrote her notes and arranged the medicines.

‘I saw this form,’ she said, pushing a grey photocopy to me, ‘that your mum hasn’t filled out. We really need to know what her choice is.’

I glanced over the unfilled print boxes. It was a Do Not Resuscitate order, to be signed by the palliative party.

‘Oh. Yeah, My brother and my aunt have been trying to get her to sign this, but she won’t.’

‘She wants to be resuscitated?’

‘Well, no…it’s just how she is. She puts thing off as long as she can. She kept saying “I’ll have a think and sign it later.”’

Imagine having to a sign a form that practically says “let me die when I die”. The shattering sense of mortality. Especially given that mum is only sixty-six, with estranged children still to reconcile with. My half-brother, J, still waiting for her to let him call.

‘Well, given how she is,’ the nurse said kindly, ‘we can have a GP allow the DNR on her behalf, after an assessment of her health. I can sort a GP out to call you this morning if that’s okay?’

‘Yes please,’ I nodded. Honestly, despite the anguish she has caused me and how often I blamed her for the ruin of my life, I cannot stomach the idea of her continuing to live in the state she is, with the added pain of a crushed ribcage after the thuds of chest compressions.

I called D and my aunt for their opinion. They agreed. So when the GP called me, waking me from another slight sleep, I put a Do Not Resuscitate order on my own mother.

Despite being awake nearly two days, I stood at the door of the living room and watched her sleep. Her breaths were steady, deep. She looked peaceful. It was such a relief to see her relaxed, I cried.

My phone chirped. A message from my brother, D.

“You’re doing so well. I’m really proud of you x”

06/04/2026

I have to listen hard for gentle breaths. They are irregular, and very quiet. A few times I’ve been tempted to tiptoe over the faded carpet and put my palm under her nose to check. I wonder if she ever did that to me when I was a baby.

The elephant stands in that room, in a corner where twenty years ago I perched at an enormous computer monitor, posting inane crap on a MySpace page.

There’s barely anything else in there now. One worn sofa, a modern flatscreen TV on glass stand, the solid wood coffee table which used to sit in the waiting room of the hotel she and her now husband ran. There’s a patch on the underside where I, bored aged seven, scratched away a load of varnish with the cap of a pen.

The elephant is weak, wizened, its eyes are sallow and grey – but it’s still there. And she won’t address it. And neither will I, at this point. When her husband did to me what he did when I was a child, she became a victim too. I can’t imagine how much turmoil she went through. It makes me sad to think about how heartbroken she must have been.

I wonder if the trauma killed her emotions altogether.

I barely slept last night. All I could think about was the ghosts in this house – I saw them in my mind’s eye. I saw my brother and I, 14 and 15, walking in to our new home for the first time.

I remember feeling a bit odd right off the bat. Not because it was – is – a decent-sized house in a nice area; but because it was the first time we’d live in a family house. And that meant me and my brother, my mum and her future husband were a family.

The incidents that I remember happened in a grotty maisonette attached to the back of the hotel. There, mum’s partner had his own room and my brother and I slept in mum’s until we were about ten.

Then, we all moved into a part of the hotel, where my brother and I’s rooms were isolated on the third floor of the narrow townhouse directly attached to the hotel. The four of us used to have dinner in the spacious dining room, surrounded by round tables decked with waterproof cloths.

But this house; this was smaller. More intimate. With a separate living room and dining room, three bedrooms, spare room and a bathroom it was already way bigger than the poky little number my dad lived in alone, half an hour away. But that was different. Dad was my dad, and he had never even glanced at me the wrong way.

Mum and her partner decorated before my brother and I arrived. Framed pictures of Spitfires, navy vessels, and some of the relics from the bar at their then-closed hotel: a wooden wall sign claiming “Guinness gives you strength”, a map of Scotland pinned with the best whiskey distilleries, a great round shield gifted by Yorvik Viking Centre boasting signatures from famous hotel guests.

‘That’s Ian Lavender’s signature,’ I can remember mum telling me the Monday after he signed it, her face flush with Bacardi and coke and heaps of blusher. ‘Ian Lavender from Dad’s Army.’

I, about nine, had no idea who Ian Lavender from Dad’s Army was. But you can guarantee I went to school the next day and told my classmates that my mum had hosted Ian Lavender from Dad’s Army and he had signed the big shield hung up in the bar.

My brother and I didn’t argue over who got which bedroom in the new house. I refused what would become the spare room, since it was directly next to mum and her partner’s bedroom.

I chose the room on the opposite side of the landing, down a short turn of a corridor. It was larger than the adjacent room my brother took, but being uncarpeted and laid with creaky varnish floorboards it was much colder.

My reasoning was that if someone tried to creep into my room in the middle of the night, I’d hear them in the corridor first and then certainly hear them on the bare creaking floorboards.

I didn’t assume that my mother’s partner was going to do anything again. He never touched me, even innocently like on the shoulder or while holding a door open, since the incidents. But it was a consideration I made consciously. My chest was filling out, my hips were becoming rounded, and it didn’t matter how much I hid in baggy clothes – I was becoming a woman.

At half eight this morning, I woke up to York Mix radio played a little too loudly from the living room. Through the wall, I heard those tunes my brother and I as children woke up to each weekday in mum’s bedroom – Wake up, it’s a beautiful mor-ning. Bit of Boo Radleys. Followed by some Bryan Adams, then a cheeky bit of Ronan Keating. Some modern artists mixed in there too. It was jarring to hear Sabrina Carpenter’s crooning right after The Beautiful South song (“Song for Whoever”) that used to play while mum dragged a brush through my hair before primary school.

Despite being exhausted, it was not easy to fall back to sleep on the squishy two-seater sofa. I did so fleetingly, having my weird half-conscious dreams where I see the room around me, and the ghosts of myself and my brother and mum’s partner imprinted there.

When the carers came at half ten, I had to get up. I heard the whine of the bed controls moving my mother around, and the soft voices of the nurses.

Do you want to have a wash? Do you need a hand with your bag? Let’s just sit you up a bit for a minute. Have you managed to eat anything yet today?

To her credit, mum only referred to me as Louis when talking to the nurses. The one time she said Sarah, she corrected herself.

When I blearily wandered in to the kitchen to flick the kettle on, the nurses followed.

‘Louis,’ the younger nurse with a face like a perfume model asked, ‘we’ve got to give you this to give to your mum.’

A syringe and a bottle of medicine.

‘Cos we can’t administer it,’ the ethereally pretty nurse continued, ‘we aren’t qualified. You have to do it.’

I looked at them both. The other nurse, also much younger than me and with the most beautifully straight hair I’ve ever seen, shrugged.

‘I know, it doesn’t make sense,’ she said, in slightly less of a Yorkshire accent than her co-worker.

When they left, I gave my mother the syringe. It was an anti-sickness medicine, two syringes which she could administer herself. She washed it down with dissolved paracetamol in a glass of water.

‘I need to sit up now,’ she croaked gently. That meant I needed to hold her wrist and she mine, and pull her up. She was so light. Her arm so thin my thumb and forefinger had no trouble touching around her wrist.

‘That’s lovely, thanks love,’ she said, after pressing her buttons to prop herself up in bed.

She wanted orange and lemonade in her sippy cup. I did that for her. She was grateful. Sometimes she made a little joke, and I’d see a tiny glimpse of the woman she was before the incidents.

God, I’ve missed that woman so much.

Before going into the village to pick up my emergency prescription, I poked my head in to the living room to see her hunched over her phone.

‘Have you got any spare change?’ she asked.

‘Well, no.’

‘Oh never mind then.’

‘No,’ I insisted, ‘what are you after?’

‘Can you get me a copy of The Times? But if they don’t have The Times, don’t bother,’ she added.

‘Sure,’ I said, someone under severe financial distress as yet unaware of the price of the Saturday copy of The Times.

It was odd walking that path down to the high street, as I had done many years ago. I saw the exact corner where I collapsed crying aged 19 after my brother had one of his crash-outs and stormed out of the house – his anger at what mum’s partner had done often bubbled over during that period. There’s a lavender bush there now.

When I got back, I peeked in to the living room to see my mother faceplanted on the blanket like a cat. Her little teddy bear (Bertie?) was perched beside her, turned towards her spindly arm.

I propped her newspaper on the end of the bed, and went to catch up on some sleep.

The calls for me were frequent in the following hours.

Usually, it was for something out of her reach. At one point, I had to work out why the bed wasn’t working. She didn’t want any food, but she did an online order for some Milkybars.

‘I can get them from the shop if you want,’ I offered, my face stained with tears as I prepared to go for another walk.

She looked pissed off at me.

‘I’ve got some coming on Monday,’ she said.

I knew full well to leave it at that. She’s probably not going to eat them anyway. At this point, I’m not sure she can.

She wanted to sit up again. I pulled her up, my palm around her wrist and hers on mine, and she wobbled on the soft mattress.

‘Oh bugger,’ she said, looking at me from the cushions. ‘I’ve fallen back down.’

Again, my palm on her wrist, hers on mine. She weighed very little.

She sent me out so she could change her stoma bag in peace. A few minutes later she called for me again.

‘I can’t get the spray to come out,’ she said, holding up a little aerosol can. Some stuff to dissolve the glue that holds the bag to the stoma.

It was already shocking enough to see my mother have to lift up her shirt, breasts that thirty-seven years ago fed me, resting beside the deflated skin of her belly button. She looked like a crinkled balloon.

But to watch her peel away the sticker of the stoma bag with her long-nailed fingers, asking for me to spray where the glue stuck too hard; that was a lot for me. That was a huge amount for me. I tried not to look, because I know she’s embarrassed and grossed out, but it’s hard not to when you’re angling some spray around a very stubborn sticker.

‘It’s disgusting,’ she muttered, more to herself than me.

My heart broke for her.

I thought about my brother, my dad. If they were in this situation, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. I’d probably make jokes about it, and they back.

But her…this woman who for the last fifteen years was a spectre – a stranger that shouldn’t be such…it felt odd. It felt like I was encroaching, and I had no way of comforting her because I don’t know how.

She dealt with the rest of it herself, until the carers came again.

‘Are you okay, Louis?’ The ethereally pretty one asked when she found me hiding in the kitchen. I was not okay. It all came flooding out. The ghosts, the spectre, the cause of my haunting.

Bless her, she looked so concerned. I was mortified to have offloaded all that on her, but once I started I couldn’t stop. It was like a burst faucet.

She said it was horrifying what had happened to me. She said she would talk to her head nurse about counselling and extra support. She kept saying ‘I can’t make it not have happened’, as if it were her responsibility.

Horrifying.

It’s odd. I’ve spent the last thirty years seeing it as just some funny thing that the funny man did.

But the ethereal nurse is right. It was horrifying. It is horrifying.

I’m finishing this post at 2am. I had to stop a few times to have a cry, and to check in on mum. She keeps making noises, like she’s fighting someone in her sleep.

An hour ago, I heard her ask her Alexa to turn the fan heater on. I creeped to the door, poked my head through to see whether she had gone back to sleep.

‘What you want?’ her groggy voice, surprisingly loud, popped from the darkness. I just about shit myself.

‘Just checking on you,’ I replied, calmly as I could manage.

‘Blurrghhh’, she offered.

I’ve heard her talking in her sleep since then. Even with a wall between us, I can hear the panic. I don’t dare to think what she is dreaming of. Hurt people hurt people.

But she will never tell me. She will never tell me just how hurt she is.

Those paintings of spitfires and whiskey and navy paraphernalia are exactly where they were the first time I ever walked into this house. There is not a single photograph of me, or either of my brothers.

It’s like we were never here at all.

05/04/2026

When I was little, she made the devastating decision to continue her relationship with someone who did to me what should never, ever be done to a seven and eight-year-old: or anyone, really.

In the following decades, she did everything she could to keep the incident under wraps. I knew not to tell anyone. My dad didn’t know. She purposely distanced my brother and I from our half-brother, her son from a previous relationship, who was around 17 when it happened.

At the time, I didn’t understand. I thought the funny man mum lived with had done a bunch of things that were a bit weird. Really, the only time I’d felt a sort of dark chill in my chest around him was when he was drunk and was restraining me with my wrists, pulling me up in the air, making kissy faces at me while I (wearing nothing but Minnie Mouse pants) tried to struggle away. That didn’t feel good.

But when I told mum about the really bad thing I had woke up to him doing, I got a toy dog as a “sorry”. My brother got one too, a plush-furred terrier with a tartan hat. And that was that.

I held on to my toy dog for months. I called it Spotty, because the ribbon around its next was black with white spots. It slept with me every night. When mum and her partner took my brother and I up to stay on a boat for New Year’s Eve, the man pulled out the ship’s stamp - a wooden stump with rubber engraving of the tiny yacht - and asked if I wanted Spotty to have the stamp on its paw.

‘To make him a proper sailor,’ he said, his eyes a little wet and red. They were usually wet and red.

I admired the ink on Spotty’s paw many times afterwards. I made sure not to touch the synthetic fur, in case it would rub off.

And life went on. I don’t remember if she coached me not to tell my dad. He never knew until I told him many years later.

And then we started getting sex education lessons at school. That’s when I came to realise what had happened.

At the age of about ten (?), the concept of virginity was explained to me by a girl who insisted that tampons would break it.

I wondered if mine was broken? I really didn’t know. I had only known exactly what had happened because I woke up while it was happening, and that time he was only messing with my face. All the other things I wouldn’t understand were sexual until a few years later.

But that’s when a “willy” as my brother and I would call it, moved from being something really funny to being something horrifying.

I stayed at mum’s house for half the week every week, right up until I was ready to go to university. I always felt like I was in danger, but as far as I know he never did anything else to me. He did small, creepy things from a distance: the stares with a touch of darkness behind them, the pretending to have been passing my bedroom door and not actually listening at it, the lingering on my underwear as he piled it into the washing machine.

Or was I imagining that? Was I imagining the way he looked at my breasts as they filled out? Or when I saw him in the reflection of the kitchen window, staring at my arse while I washed a cup?

They seemed happy together, him and mum. The last time I saw them, her in her early fifties and him late sixties, they were holding hands while I scuttled after them in an ASDA. I was tagging along to their weekly big shop during a random visit so I could buy my own wine and not be shouted at for drinking any of her nightly Special Brew.

I still remember how furious she was when I, suicidal and self harming at the time, threw up in the guest bedroom from the hangover. All she cared about was that empty tin. It was like my laments about my mental state went right over her head.

When I moved away, I tried to keep in touch. But being away from them both and recently out of an abusive relationship, the creeping realisation that I wasn’t over what had happened to me as a little girl turned into an anger. A rage.

So, when she stopped bothering to text or call, I did too.

It was painful.

There were so many times in the last nearly fifteen years when I really needed a mother. I needed someone to invite me over, have biscuits and a cup of tea, watch some trash show together, and help me through what was happening. A lot happened during those years - some really, really fucking awful things. Really fucking awful things that were a direct result of her actions.

Because when at a young age you’re victimised, you are likely to fall into a process of revictimisation. Out of fear, in most of my cases. Or in the case of the abusive relationship, honestly not thinking I was worthy of better. My own mother saw the man who had hurt me as more valuble. What did that make me?

Nothing. Less than nothing.

Even my brother, who stayed in Yorkshire and continued to try to connect with her only to be rebuffed, reached the end of his rope after asking for her help during a terrible time in his life and being practically told to piss off. Not to mention, as a dad to a little girl now and knowing what happened when we were kids, some already horrific knowledge gained a new context.

When I tried to do myself in in October 2021, I called her. She did not pick up.

A few times since, I tried again. No response.

I wondered if she didn’t have my number. But of course, my brother would have given it to her if she asked. She just didn’t ask. She barely even spoke to him anyway. And she had entirely cut my half-brother off.

But maybe…maybe she didn’t have my number, and was too embarrassed to ask for it?

Even so, with the help of my therapist, I grieved her. I grieved the woman I wanted her to be, and the woman she was. I grieved the little girl who had her childhood taken away, and I grieved the man who hurt that child - the man my mother saw as more important than her own babies.

But

On the 6th January this year, my brother messaged me.

‘Just so you know, Mum’s in hospital.’

It was weird. I’d been dreading that message for long. My brother hadn’t heard from her in about a year. She had shut herself off completely and had been in hospital a while. The only reason she called him was to say that she was worried about her partner, now husband; that funny man with the often watery, red eyes.

Left at home on his own and needing full time care, he was liable to fall. He’d had a stroke some years before and mum was his carer.

They were both, my brother told me after visiting them both, “absolutely fucked”. That’s the medical term.

A heavy drinker all her life, she never slowed down. The last I knew, she was drinking at least four cans of Special Brew a night. In the near decade and a half since she’d raged at me for nicking and downing a can during a suicidal episode, she’d amped things up considerably. My brother lamented the sheer amount of half-empty spirit bottles dotted around what was our childhood and teenage years home. They popped up in every room like mini obelisks.

And she had barely been eating. She blamed her partner for that, since she was busy looking after him. Whether that is true is something we will never know. She’s never been one to tell the whole story. Or, you know, the truth.

I asked my brother if I should call her, text her, anything. Even after all this time I still wanted that mother. Still.

But she didn’t want to hear from me. She didn’t seem to believe she was that ill at all.

But she was. She is.

Knowing the details of my trauma and how mentally sick I am, my brother gave me info of the developing situation if I asked for it, or if it was important.

He never demanded I drive all the way up north to help out with things, and never complained. Despite how much hurt she has caused him (which is not my story to tell), he made and makes himself available for her. And she can be very difficult and obstinate. She always could be very difficult and obstinate.

My mother did not believe she has cancer.

Even after the years of symptoms, even after the doctors told her there was a tumour, even after all the tests and even after the fatal diagnosis.

Rectal cancer, advanced beyond any curing. Partly because of the size, mostly because of her health. Which, as you recall, is “absolutely fucked”.

Palliative only. A year, maybe.

When my brother relayed the news, my soul left my body. I was in my new home more than a hundred and fifty miles away, sitting on a carpet that still smelled of the previous tenants’ dog, as my three rats Borscht, Chowder and Oxtail fought over who got to sit in my lap.

For a moment I saw myself from the ceiling corner. I was looking down at a thirty-seven-year-old child.

She didn’t text or call. My brother told her I was waiting to reconnect, but as the days turned into weeks it became clear that she wasn’t going to be the one to rip off the plaster - maybe she thought I’d launch right in to having a go at her for the PTSD and CPTSD that has me, to coin the phrase, “absolutely fucked”.

But I’m not going to chuck that on a dying woman. All this time she’s ignored the elephant lumbering around the room, so it’s not like me bundling in at the end and pointing at the massive fucking thing rummaging through dusty bookcases with its trunk will make any kind of difference.

So, I texted her first. It’s okay if it’s too much for you right now, but do you want to reconnect. Yes, she replied, she would love to when she’s got her head around things.

I left it. She didn’t follow up.

A good week or so after, she got sent home from hospital. I decided to shove the elephant aside and followed up myself. Again, no pressure, but here is a video of me trying to manage my chaotic girl rats.

She responded to a photo of Honey Mustard dangling from the top of the cage and licking a plate of custard, with a heart emoji.

Her responses are always minimal. An emoji, a couple of words. I hold on to them like buoys in a dark sea. Years of nothing, and now I am ravenous for the crumbs.

My aunt, who I barely know, reconnected with my mum during this time despite her own set of trauma. She has been staying at the house as a help, just while things are sorted with the NHS.

I’ve not seen my aunt in more than twenty years. My mother has kept the truth from her all this time. She’d purposely distanced me and my brother from our own aunt so her sister might not find out.

But my aunt found out from my half-brother, who reconnected with her about a year ago.

I’ll never forget the text I got in February from my aunt, out of the blue - she apologised for not doing something at the time, all those years ago. She apologised for not protecting me. She apologised for the signals she saw at the time, the weird things she noticed but never followed up on. She, who had not even known about it, and can’t have possibly considered such a horrendous thing of her own sister and her partner, was apologising to the little girl I used to be. An apology I will never, ever get from my own mother.

My aunt is such a kind soul. It’s not her apology to make.

Mum was given one round of chemotherapy. The understanding is that she won’t survive another round. My brother called to let me know that if I’m ever going to see her again, I’m going to have to do it now.

This Sunday last I got in my ramshackle Volkswagen and drove three hours up north to a place I never hoped to see again.

I stopped only once to get petrol. I knew that if I did a proper break for food or a rest, I’d change my mind and drive back home. The closer I got to York, where all those horrible things happened, the more I felt the shadow of a colossus looming before me. The more my chest felt heavy, the more the flashbacks came.

I knew her husband wasn’t in the house. He’s in a care home now, brain a fried egg from another stroke. I’ve not even considered going through the boxes of brain bullshit regarding him, but he’s physically healthy so I have a bit more time to prepare myself. And I do want to see him - I want a different memory of him rather than the big, hairy man with kissy faces and a firm grip on my tiny wrists from my flashbacks. I want to see him as a frail old man who can’t hurt me anymore. I want the little girl in me to see that.

In any case,

Driving through the village, the passage of time washed over me. I recognised some things; the bright pink and yellow playground near the town hall, the boxes of flowers out the front of the bus stop, the dulled limestone bricks of the little chapel.

And then there’s the restaurant that’s popped up next to the village shop, the new benches where long ago I perched on sandstone steps waiting for a bus to town, the flats that have emerged from what I only remember as the burned remains of a mansion nobody wanted to claim.

The tarmac is new, fresh; it was soft on my car tyres - right up until the driveway to my mum’s house. The strip where the tarmac ends and becomes a dip into pebbles and moss is a portal into 2012, where time stopped the moment I left this place for good.

It’s a long driveway, between high wooden fences soaked with slimy moss. Every cell in my body tensed as I rolled along. The alcohol smell of that living room where they both watched TV every night, the feeling of being watched by him, the way the sunlight poured through my window in the mornings when he would tap on the door to wake me for school.

After I pulled up on the mossy gravel beside the front door, I sat in my car for the longest time. I’d been briefed that my aunt wouldn’t be back from seeing friends until about seven. I’d arrived at ten to. Should I wait for my aunt? Just how bad was it going to be? Was I going to get pummelled by all sorts of emotions the second I walked into that home that was never really mine?

For some reason, I brushed my hair. I checked my mascara in the rear view mirror. I used a dragon-shaped hairclip to put my hair up, like mum used to with a fish-shaped pin when I was a little girl if her partner took us to some posh restaurant.

I took the key from its hiding place, and let myself in quietly.

‘Hello?’ I said into a muggy silence.

It smelled like I remember.

Music played from somewhere. The living room? I recognised the song as a frequent track on Minster FM. She used to wake up to it when my brother and I were still sleeping in her bedroom as children.

I tapped on the door to the living room. There was a pause.

‘Yeah?’ a frail voice asked from inside.

I creaked open the door.

On a wheeled hospital bed sat a frail, emaciated old woman, surrounded by pillows. A walking frame weighed down with bags stood on the grubby carpet beside her, along with a coffee table piled with half-empty cups, a protein shake bottle, a sippy cup of water, a tablet in its sleeve, crossword book, untouched box of biscuits and a few documents.

Body cleaning wipes and an ineffective air freshener was perched on a hefty CD player system and its disconnected speakers. And a white Alexa unit stood beside a little stack of CDs. That was where the music was coming from. It was tinny. Just a little bit too loud.

The old woman was hunched over a large touchscreen phone, holding a touch pen in her grey, long-nailed hand. Her arms were so thin, she could barely lift them. I could see her pale scalp through her thin hair.

She looked up.

That’s when my sixty-six-year-old mother and I saw each other for the first time in nearly a decade and a half.

‘Oh,’ she said in a soft, gravelly voice, ‘hello.’

I felt like I had been punched in the chest.

I think it was a good thirty minutes of her talking about herself before she asked how I have been.

When she asked, she looked me in the eyes, and she looked so sad. Like a dog that knows it did wrong, but still wants love.

I started to cry when I told her about my suicide attempt.

She was quiet for a moment, then started talking about smart bulbs. The lamp had one. It had burst. It needed sorting.

She had not changed. She has not changed.

She will never be the mother I desperately need. She never has been.

My brother warned me. I knew what to expect, I suppose. But at the same time, I held on to that buoy in the dark sea. Even sat listening to her weak, husky voice, I searched for that tiny slip of brightness that suggests she might even consider becoming the woman that she should always have been for me, my brother, my half-brother.

Not long after, my aunt showed up – a beautiful woman inside and out that I was cheated out of knowing. We slipped away to the kitchen, where bags of unused adult nappies and boxes of stoma bags spanned the table that my brother and I had eaten dinner at years before.

I wasn’t there for long before I started struggling. I made a cup of tea and went back to try to talk to my mother. And I was getting nothing from her. Only complaints about what had happened to her the last few months, and complaints about her husband who obviously I was in no state to be talking about. It was true emotional turmoil.

Eventually, mum checked out. She could tell I was upset, but didn’t want to address it. She hunched over her phone again, pen in grey hand. I noticed how her collar bones looked like handles. I could see the nubs of her spine through her soft shirt.

‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Okay, love,’ she replied, not looking up.

The next morning, I went back round with my brother. While he was in the living room with the care nurse and my aunt, I hid in the kitchen to regulate my emotions without embarrassing myself.

That’s when I noticed the corkboard in the kitchen, bathed in a slip of sunlight through dusty blinds.

It was pocked with yellowed notes. Leaves from pads left over after mum and her husband shut their hotel and restaurant nearly thirty years ago. Those red numbers at the bottom of each yellowed paper strip, the order number; take it to the chef, get the guest fed. My brother and I, seven and eight, watching the waitresses flit between napkined tables while we slumped on fake leather armchairs, waiting for Dad to pick us up for the weekend.

There in the middle of the corkboard, surrounded by pinned receipts and appointment reminders, was a stump of paper yellowed by more than a decade of direct sunlight.

“SARAH”

And beneath my deadname, my mobile phone number.

30/03/2026

One of the scariest things I’ve known is a blank page. I see it as intimidating. I see it as demanding, expecting of something beautiful amazing perfect, and nothing else is good enough.

So I don’t start, I don’t write, for fear of humiliating myself.

I do not believe in myself, and it shows.

This year I started to dabble in standup comedy and entertaining. I’ve only been able to do a few gigs, but I’ve learned my main failing is I just don’t think I can do it, despite the fact I absolutely can. It’s like my brain and body pulls me away from potential just in case I fuck it up.

In the words of Dylan Moran: “It’s POTENTIAL! Leave it!”

The same is true regarding music. A huge part of me knows I’m good enough to create half decent music, but as soon as I hit a record button all resolve pisses out like closing time at a Wetherspoons. There could be a million songs I write that are amazing, but one crappy recording or one poor lyric line and my brain mutters “lol you’re useless”. So why risk it? Why humiliate myself?

And if any part of the process is fucked up by anyone else - like, for example, Unbound stealing all my backer’s money at the start of this year then leaving me in the shit with a finished book and two years’ of work down the drain - I take that failing as mine. Just mentioning Unbound makes me feel guilty. And I DO need to do a video about that or write a post on here, but the fear is insane; because here’s the other thing.

On the internet, it does not matter how much solid proof you give. I could screenshot each of my emails with Unbound, transcribe them, give a timeline, and there will STILL be certain people adamant that I and the hundreds of other authors fucked over by them are at fault.

(But fuck it, I’m going to tell my Unbound story on here shortly. And I’ll do a video. It’s like a festering tumour in my mind that needs to come out.)

In any case.

As is often the case, the fear comes from my childhood.

I was brought up in two households, neither of which I felt safe in. In one household I had been molested, and in the other my newly-separated Dad was so stressed and angry all the time from being on the brink of poverty I walked on eggshells. And he really didn’t like me doing things like reading or drawing because he considered such things antisocial, or not really work.

I used to keep my writing and reading till bedtime, peering at scribbles on paper from my pillow while the cat purred serenely next to me.

My primary school was run by a series of middle-aged witches. Those of us who couldn’t pull together our times tables were put in the corner for being “silly” or “childish”. One teacher, Mrs P, seemed to enjoy making the neurodivergent miserable, telling one autistic kid he was such a baby he needed nappies, and letting me sit in turmoil during art lessons because I didn’t have a black pen and she had instructed us that he HAD to outline our work in black. I remember her looking over at me pleased with herself, until I finally burst into tears and she pulled me into her lap and cooed “you should have said you didn’t have a black pen rather be silly.”

I grew up thinking that anything less than perfect was not good enough. My mum would always say “that’s good, Sar” when I showed her my drawings or writing. But she never said “that’s perfect, Sar” and for some reason that translated in my head as rubbish.

My Dad, who had not read a book since he was twelve, tried very hard to concentrate long enough to read one of my stories. If he was in a bad mood he would refuse to read them at all, giving me an “oh, good” when I told him I’d got 9/10 in class.

But the absolute root of it all has to be that my mother chose a man over her own child. Surely that meant I wasn’t good enough. And no amount of anything I could do would make me good enough - I mostly got As at school, but Mum would point out the D I got in maths.

I think when we become adults, we rework the tapestry of our childhood into something that it wasn’t. For me, my memories that stick out are mostly negative because the emotional responses at the time was so severe, and as such I look back on that time with sadness.

There must have been happy moments and moments when I felt safe.

The only memory I have of feeling like I was enough for the adults around me was when, aged six and around the time my parents were separating, Mum and Dad sat on either side of me on a bench outside of my school while I pretended to have an asthma attack. Not because I didn’t have asthma - I did, it was a mild allergic reaction to our cats - but because I realised that making them worried about me was when they really showed me love. Those concered, hooded eyes, the way my dads arms felt so warm and Mum’s long-nailed fingers felt so cold.

In adulthood, my desperate search for validation is fruitless. I will never been good enough for myself.

This year, I am trying to come to terms with that.

As a writer, I will always make mistakes. I will always find someone who doesnt like my style, or thinks I’m crap. The last year how shown me the reality is that every single writer has the same worries and same experiences; especially online.

I can’t keep going over every single thing I put online, anxiously searching for spelling errors and grammar mistakes. I don’t have an editor, I only have me. And if people want to point fingers at one spelling error and denounce me as some kind of moron, that’s on them. I refuse to be so critical of myself any more, and allow myself to make mistakes - because that’s how you learn and grow.

So here I am, picking myself up and starting again. And trying. And scared. But here we go.

Louis x

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