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whether they like it or not, another burden when it’s already enough work just being a girl, then a teenage girl, let alone a teenage girl who belongs to someone else. Luckily I don’t have that. I think I’d feel like a split personality if I had a mom. I would call her Mom and not Mother, which makes me think of Jane Austen, or Mommy, which makes me think of Joan Crawford.
    Mom said Manny could care for me better than she ever could and she was right. I think she found herself. Every now and then we get a postcard from an artists’ colony in TopangaCanyon, an Israeli kibbutz, or a monastery in the south of France. If I found myself, I’d say, “Well, there you are, Viva, so nice to meet you,” and then I’d go back to bed. I don’t think about her. I think about pasta in the shape of Hello Kitty, stockings with diamond seams up the back, Marilyn’s crumbling cake-mascara, and Liz Taylor’s new white hair. I haven’t got time for the trivials.

Chapter Three
    I was always a highly strung child. I had to take eleven days off school when I was five after Uncle Manny took me to see
Bambi
. Four years later I was still undergoing therapy for separation trauma brought on by the scene where Bambi’s mother is shot by a hunter. This was not an uncommon phobia at the time. In nursery, I became friendly with a boy called “Superman Jeff” who wore his pants over his trousers and cried when his mother dropped him off because it reminded him of baby Superman being sent to earth as his planet exploded around him. Still, he was not nearly as traumatised as me. At least Superman’s mum and dad came to life as holograms of Marlon Brando and Susannah York. Bambi’s was dead, full stop, no deer hologram. No magic powers. Shot by hunters with nary a Gucci deer jacket to show for it.
    I liked the idea of therapy—it was something I had heard Woody Allen talk highly of. I could tell Manny was worried that everyone would think I was a five-year-old freak because he kept saying, “If you have a session that clashes with a lesson, just tell your friends you have to go to Hebrew class.”
    â€œNo way,” I choked, “that’s so embarrassing,” and every time I had an appointment I’d raise my hand and say, asloudly as I could, “Miss Matthews, I have to be excused. I have an appointment with my therapist.”
    She’d blush and whisper, “Oh, your
therapist
,” as if “therapist” were actually a code word for “Hebrew lesson.”
    Uncle Manny looked after me in the eleven days I was away from school, in self-enforced Bambi exile. He drew me a cartoon strip of
Crime and Punishment
to read, so my education wouldn’t suffer. I wriggled about on Manny’s boyfriend’s lap whilst he was trying to read an E. M. Forster biography, and lay my head on the page so my chocolate curls obscured the writing.
    Now here I am, seventeen with a bullet, failing school miserably, even the subjects I’m good at. The bullshit classes. The ones I can talk my way out of. English, Art, Classics, History, Religious Studies. Sample Religious Studies question: “Is racism a good thing or a bad thing?” It’s enough to make you become a Klansman, just so the answer will be less dull to write; and the two black girls in my class feel the same. I just can’t be bothered to answer anymore. I expect to fail Maths, Biology, French. I fully intend to. But even I am a little ashamed about being bottom of the class in Religious Studies.
    We’re sitting our mocks at the moment. School is mocking me. Not just the kids and the teachers, but the timbers that hold the building upright. The end-of-year exams are a big deal. They determine whether or not you go to university. I don’t want to go to university. I don’t like unity and I hate verses—I just love the chorus of songs. I have no motivation because they