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that since has got totally out of hand. There are dogs on every surface now: spaniels, Alsatians, chihuahuas, basset hounds, Yorkshire terriers (her favourites). There are musical dogs, portraits of dogs, dogs dressed up as people; dogs eager-tongued and lolloping, sitting to attention, paws lifted in silent appeal, heads topped with little pink bows.
    I broke one once, when I was a boy, and she beat me – though I denied the crime – with a piece of electrical cord. Even now, I still hate those dogs. She knows it, too – but they are her babies, she explains (with a terrible, girlish coyness), and besides, she tells me, she never complains about all my nasty stuff upstairs.
    Not that she even knows what I do. I have my privacy: rooms of my own, all of them with locks on the doors, from which she is excluded. The converted loft and study room, the bathroom, the bedroom; and the darkroom in the cellar. I’ve made a home for myself here, with my books, my playlists, my online friends, while she spends her days in the parlour, smoking, doing crosswords, dusting and watching daytime TV –
    Parlour . I always hated that word, with all its fake middle-class resonances, and its stink of citrus potpourri. Now I hate it even more, with her faded chintz and her china dogs and her reek of desperation. Of course, I couldn’t leave her. She knew that from the very first; knew that her decision to stay kept me here, chained to her, a prisoner, a slave. And I am a dutiful son to her. I make sure her garden is always neat. I see to her medication. I drive her to her salsa class (Ma drives, but prefers to be driven). And sometimes, when she’s not there, I dream . . .
    My mother is a peculiar blend of conflicts and contradictions. Marlboros have ruined her sense of smell, but she always wears Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue. She despises novels, but loves to read dictionaries and encyclopaedias. She buys ready meals from Marks & Spencer, but fruit and veg from the market in town – and always the cheapest fruit and veg, bruised and damaged and past their prime.
    Twice a week, without fail (even the week of Nigel’s death), she puts on a dress and her high-heeled shoes and I drive her to her salsa class at Malbry College, after which she meets up with her friends in town, and has a cup of fancy tea, or maybe a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and speaks to them in her half-bred voice about me and my job at the hospital, where I am indispensable (according to her) and save lives on a daily basis. Then at eight I pick her up, although it’s only a five-minute walk from the bus stop. Those hoodies from the estates , she says. They’d stab you soon as look at you.
    Maybe she’s right to be cautious. The members of our family seem unusually prone to accidents. Still, I pity the hoodie who tries to mess with my mother. She knows how to look after herself. Even now, at sixty-nine, she’s sharp enough to draw blood. What’s more, she knows how to strike back at anyone who threatens us. She is a little more subtle, perhaps, than in the days of the electrical cord, but even so, it isn’t wise to antagonize Gloria Winter. I learnt that lesson very young. In that, if nothing else, I was a precocious pupil. Not as smart as Emily White, the little blind girl whose story has coloured so much of my life, but smart enough to have survived when neither of my brothers did.
    Still, isn’t that all over now? Emily White is long dead; her plaintive voice silenced, her letters burnt, the blurry flashgun photographs curled away in secret drawers and on bookshelves in the Mansion. And even if she were not, somehow, the Press have almost forgotten her. There are other things to squawk about; newer scandals over which to obsess. The disappearance of one little girl, over twenty years ago, is no longer cause for public concern. Folk have moved on. Forgotten her. Time for me to do the same.
    The problem is this. Nothing ends. If ever Ma taught me anything, it is