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disappear. She felt the ground fall away from her perfect summer. She was only five years old but already, here it was, her first lesson in how to love and lose – a toughening-up for the future. A horrible something took hold of Maria’s heart and gave it a painful twist. Her only thought:
how will I love anything more than I loved those melons?

7 DAYS SINCE
    “Car’s here, Melon,” Paul is yelling from downstairs.
    I go into Mum’s room, close the door behind me and open up her Victorian relic of a wardrobe. Inside, the clothes are jammed together so tightly that none of them can breathe. A few dead cardigans lie on the bottom of the wardrobe strangled by belts and shoelaces.
    I’m looking for the burgundy dress.
    Anything with a zip wouldn’t fit me. The burgundy dress is stretchy. It’ll cling to the wrong bits and my knickers will show, but I don’t need to look sexy. I need to look like the grieving daughter. Everything in my wardrobe makes me look too happy or too sad (both meanings of the word ‘sad’). I just want to wear my denim skirt and a T-shirt. Mum wouldn’t have cared less, but today is all about Paul and what his bloody social worker friends think.
    I take the dress off the hanger. It smells of those green plastic balls that stop the moths eating your jumpers. After a bit of Impulse spray it’ll be fine.
    I pull off my black jumper and drop my skirt to the floor. I put the dress on over my head, wriggle the thing into place. I thought the arms would be too small but they go all the way to my wrists just fine. I tug the seams into the right places, then shut the wardrobe so I can see myself in the mirror on the door. Something squeezes my throat. It’s like seeing a ghost. I look over my shoulder expecting someone else to be there. There’s Mum’s empty bed, the duvet and pillows made neat by Paul.
    I go back to the reflection. There are differences – the way the dress stretches more than it ever had to over Mum’s chest, the way my arms look like party balloons, the way my belly creates a little mound – but still . . .
    Mum’s stomach was the only thing about her body that was flawed. It was chopping-board flat but she had these stretch marks, little silver lines worming their way around her belly button. It looked like a road map – Piccadilly Circus. There was a straight, red line drawn underneath it all, just above her where her skimpy pants stopped. These lines and scar never went brown like the rest of her skin, even after a whole day’s sunbathing in Crete. I pointed them out once when we were on Tersanas beach and she wafted me away like a stupid fly.
    “Oh, I am not caring about those,” she’d said. Then she’d slowly rolled herself over. The local boys on the patch of sand next to us had watched, dribbling, as if my mum was a supermarket rotisserie chicken. They were closer to my age than hers.
    Mum propped herself up on her elbows and added, “Actually, I am liking them, the lines. They remind me that I give birth to you.” She had smiled – pleased with that. She could never be like everyone else and have at least one little hang-up.
    The more I look in the mirror, the more I see our differences and the less I see that first thing – that ghost. It’s gone. I’ve scared it off.
    “Car’s here, Melon,” Paul yells again.
    I heard him the first time. I know he’s twitching by the front door, desperate for nothing to go wrong, as if us being five minutes late would be a bigger disaster than Mum dying in the first place.
    Before I go, I find the bottle of vanilla perfume on Mum’s jumble sale dressing table and give myself a good squirting. I leave my jumper and skirt on the floor. Mum was never one to stress about mess.
    Paul is waiting downstairs in the hallway in a black suit. His mum, Irene, is flapping around him like an overweight butterfly. They’ve been crying. They have matching gluey streaks on powder brown cheeks. Irene fixes Paul’s tie and picks