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two or three times, I never expected to be successful so soon. This is me getting my foot well and truly on the career ladder. The only way is up and all that.
    “Yes. Thank you. Yes please, I’d love to be in the training program.” I try to listen carefully as the personnel manager reels off further details and instructions regarding the paperwork I’ll need to complete. She promises to email me the necessary forms. I thank her again and hang up.
    I’m still bouncing along on cloud nine when my mobile trills again. I pull it out of my bag tucked neatly under my desk, expecting another conversation with the Council’s human resources department about my newly elevated position. Instead, I find myself on the wrong end of a nearly incoherent call from my mother, declaring that unless I get my arse back to Barrow immediately to help her out of her current spot of bother, the younger Jones’ will be taken into care—again.
    I try to reason with her, or at the very least find out something about the nature and scale of this current catastrophe. But from the moment I first hear her voice on the other end of the line, in my heart I know it’s useless—a waste of perfectly good oxygen. It’s always useless. Each time I get myself sorted, set up somewhere, just when I’m doing okay, my mother hits another one of her crises and that’s it. Suddenly it all becomes my responsibility. It’s up to me to sort things out, to save the day. And when I express any opposition to that view, I’m suddenly the ogre. I’m the villain of the piece who’d condemn the little ones, poor innocent mites, to a life in care.
    A life in and out of care was pretty much what I got growing up, and despite that, I somehow managed to scrape together a few GCSEs and get myself onto a college course to train as a librarian. My mother earned her living, our living, variously as a lap dancer, a stripper and, on rare occasions, a singer. And she worked as a prostitute when times were hard. Times were often hard. Her occasional convictions for soliciting resulted in a series of short but disruptive custodial sentences throughout my childhood, hence I regularly found myself thrown on the mercy of social services. On the whole the social workers did all right, though to be fair my standards were pretty low back then.
    My academic success, relatively modest though it might be, was hard won. It came as a massive relief to me and was a source of some considerable disappointment to my mother, who had another career in mind for me. Joining the family business, you might say. I’d tried it for a few horrible, desperate months when I felt I had no option, but the experience was mortifying. It was quite enough to convince me I had to find a different path. Something, anything, was better than earning a living on my back.
    Getting into college was my passport to a better life—a life of my own, away from Barrow—a decent, independent life, a life of self-respect, and best of all, of quiet predictability. And now I know with chilling finality that I have to leave my peaceful billet in Bristol and once more face the chaos that is life in the Jones’ house.
    I’m still hoping this is just a temporary interruption when I phone the HR department back. I have to explain to the rather astonished manager on the other end that I need a bit of time to think and won’t, after all, be accepting the offer of the place on the training program immediately. It isn’t easy.
    “Can I have a bit of time to consider the offer? Maybe a fortnight? In fact, I’m sorry but I need to take a few days leave as well, a couple of weeks probably.” Hopefully. “Personal reasons.”
    She grudgingly agrees, but goes to some considerable pains to also stress that the offer is open for two weeks only. After that time, if I haven’t accepted it, they’ll assume I’m no longer interested in the opportunity and offer it to another candidate. She makes it abundantly clear how fierce the