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back.
    Again, it was a week before the school twigged. Dad was called in with me to see the head, which didn’t please him because it meant time off work. The head told him that I’d been absent again, and made the mistake of asking what he was going to do about it.
    ‘What am I going to do about it? I drove her to school every day. I marched her through the doors. It’s your bloody job to keep her here!’ With that he gave me a look and said, ‘I’ll see you later.’
    I couldn’t have been more nervous waiting for Mum and Dad to come home that night. I made more of an effort than usual getting dinner read: I really pulled out all the stops, as though that would stop me getting punished for skipping school and, even worse, showing Dad up in front of the head.
    I’ll be honest, I was expecting the slipper. Instead, Mum said, ‘We’ve spoken to the school. They’re recommending sending you to a psychiatrist.’
    I hadn’t seen that coming. I don’t think anyone had. Mum looked sad as she said it. But they were at their wits’ end. The school said I had psychological problems. I wasn’t a normal child. I needed specialist help.
    Living in a caravan had never bothered me. But having my friends discover I was seeing a ‘shrink’ was too humiliating to imagine. I tried everything to get out of going, to no avail. Mum drove me to the therapist’s office, then sat in the waiting room until my hour was up. Then she was called in without me and it was my turn to wait.
    When the door opened again, the psychiatrist was smiling and Mum was in tears.
    I’d poured my heart out to that stranger and, by the looks of it, she’d repeated every word back to Mum. How I’d felt denieda childhood. How I felt robbed of the chance of making friends, of fitting in, each time they’d moved us. How I hadn’t felt valued as anything other than as a glorified babysitter. How I’d played mummy to a seven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old when I should have been trying on lipsticks in Boots with my friends.
    I suppose I had been rebelling, but not intentionally. I’d never meant to hurt anyone, it was just how I felt. And I think Mum understood. The psychiatrist made sure of that. Mum couldn’t wait to apologise. Dad did too, in his own way. Stephen was old enough to look after Danny now, and do more around the house. I think he realised that maybe I should have more time to call my own.
    Best of all, the psychiatrist told them I wasn’t mad. ‘Kerry won’t need to come again unless she wants to. She’s just a girl who wants a childhood she feels she never had.’
    I wasn’t a wayward teenager. I was just a normal one.
    After that, family life was sweet. For a while. Quite a short while, actually. Mum and Dad did cut me some slack and I tried to stay at school as often as I could bear.
    But then I met Simon.

CHAPTER TWO

YOU CAN ALWAYS COME BACK
    Being allowed to go out straight from school made a huge difference to my life. Still, though, Mum insisted I go home first to change. My friends weren’t made to do this but I didn’t mind. It meant by the time I got back to the beach or the square or wherever we were meeting, I’d stand out in my Madonna number among a sea of kids all bedecked in the same black and white blazers and tops.
    If anything, the boys looked more identical than the girls: there wasn’t much they could do to personalise school trousers and shirts. But even on weekends or when they’d changed, they all seemed to appear wearing the same casual ‘uniform’. It was as if they didn’t dare stand out. Which was probably why us girls found it so easy to drift from one lad to another: they looked the same, they acted the same, they may as well have been the same. I was dating a nice boy called Mark Williams at the time. We were just kids fooling around. He’d rather have been with his mates and me with mine, but going out was what we were expected to do. It would only be a matter of time before he swapped