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rage.

      I’m so upset that I still can’t speak for the rest of the night and even the next day I find myself keeping my distance from her, at least in my mind. I am looking at my mother differently now and what I see has changed something in me.

      It may only be a small loss of innocence and trust, but from that night onwards I can never turn back the clock. I cannot make things better, or find my way back again to the mother I so long for her to be.

      From that night onwards, my Dark Mummy is never far away.

      * * *

      Life with Mum is a rollercoaster. It doesn’t help that by the time I am six Dad has met someone new and within a year has gone to live with her in Manchester many miles away from where we live in Yorkshire. Her name is Maureen and she lives there with her two sons, Harry and Alex, who I discover are two and four years older than me.

      When I come downstairs one morning in the summer holidays of 1974 I find Mum crying. She’s sitting at the kitchen table filling out a large, official-looking form in her careful, almost schoolgirl handwriting.

      ‘What’s the matter, Mum, why are you crying?’

      ‘Nothing, David, just eat your breakfast.’

      ‘What’s that you’re writing?’

      ‘OK, if you want to know, I’m applying for legal aid. That’s the only way I’m going to be able to afford to pay for solicitors.’

      ‘Why do you Ford Slisters?’

      ‘Never you mind, David, you’ll understand one day.’

      It takes me a while to work out that Mum and Dad are now no longer married legally and by this time it’s 1975 and Mum tells me Dad has now married Maureen in Manchester. I can’t understand why he hasn’t invited Mum and me to the wedding. After all, we’re still his family. Why wouldn’t he want us there?

      Maureen hasn’t been involved in my parents’ separation but this doesn’t stop Mum hating her with a passion. She has managed to get a photo of her and has written ‘Bitch’ on the back.

      I don’t dislike my new stepmother. After all, I don’t know her. I haven’t even met her and nor has Mum as far as I know, but I’m intrigued as to why Mum hates her so much.

      * * *

      One day Mum and I are walking near our house when we see Rastus, our beloved orange and brown five-year-old collie, on the opposite side of the road at the top of the hill, some 50 yards away. Mum calls to him and he comes running down the hill towards us. We watch him all the way and as he gets to the road he doesn’t stop. Before we know it he’s been hit by a passing car just five yards in front of us.

      There’s a terrible screech of brakes and the next second the car stops twenty yards or so further up the road. But it’s too late – Rastus has been killed instantly.

      I can’t quite grasp what’s happened. It’s the first time I’ve been brought face to face with death and after the shock I’m inconsolable. There’s nothing we could have done to stop it but in my mind I keep re-running the incident like a video, trying to press Pause before Rastus reaches the road.

      I cry for days.

      Mum cries too as she loves her pets, especially Rastus. But although she’s very sad, her response is actually quite calm and dignified. I don’t know why, but I’m surprised as I expected her to be hysterical, like she is when she’s drinking. It now occurs to me just how carefully she can keep her emotions under control when she’s sober.

      * * *

      Dad returns to Halifax once a month and takes me to see his mother, my grandmother. They never talk at all about his father – my grandfather – and I often wonder about him. It seems that Dad has been brought up mainly by his mother and when he talks about his upbringing to me he describes it with affection.

      Grandma brushes my hair, which I like, and lavishes attention on me, which feels wonderful to me. It is unconditional and different from that of my mother. Although Mum’s attention is certainly not conditional when she is sober, when drunk the only attention I get is when she wants me to touch her. She will decide how and when to show me affection – and nothing I do makes any difference. I may not fully understand this, but I sense it. Grandma, on the other hand, does that thing that grandparents do: she’s highly attentive for a short period of time.

      But Grandma has a strange side to her personality. She lives on her own – a quiet, eccentric, affectionate woman, with unusual views. She isn’t very tall, walks with a slight stoop, and wears her long grey hair in a bun. Her house is like a junk shop, crammed with books, furniture and weird, exotic bric-a-brac, such as a carved wooden statue of three monkeys with their paws covering their eyes, mouth and ears.

      ‘That means, see no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil,’ she says.

      She’ll talk about subjects I’ve never heard anything about in a fascinating way and I hang on to her every word. She knows a huge amount, does Gran, and I’m amazed and intrigued. I often wonder what it was like for Dad having her as a mother, with just the two of them living in the same house and how it must have affected him. I also wonder what he thinks about the things she tells me, but he just sits there in an armchair among the potted palms and peacock feathers while Gran talks to me; he’s looking slightly bored and bemused, like he’s heard it all before, and just lets her get on with it.

      But, despite her crazy ideas, I love Grandma, which means that Dad doesn’t have to work too hard to entertain me.

      Nowadays it sometimes feels like Dad is simply going through the motions of being a father. I look up to him and desperately want him to be more involved. But he seems to have moved away emotionally as well as physically, never to return. He has chosen to be a distant parent and not get involved in my daily life. I can’t work out whether it’s because he doesn’t care and can’t be bothered, or because he simply doesn’t have it in him.

      * * *

      It’s really up to Mum to provide me with whatever it takes for me to have a happy and complete life and she can’t do it either. Life with her seems to rock violently from one extreme to another.

      But one thing she can do very well is make new friends. One of them lives just around the corner from the school in Calder Bridge. Mum’s new friend has a daughter the same age as me called Katie. She is very pretty with a nice smile, long brown hair and she wears glasses. I often play with her and as I’m always keen to please, I’m happy doing anything Katie wants to do.

      One evening at Katie’s house, I am alone with her and decide to do what I do with Mum: I put my hand up her skirt and into her knickers. Her minnie feels different. It is smaller and there are no hairs. I start rubbing her in the same way as I do for Mum but Katie doesn’t respond at all. This puzzles me as Mum always does, especially as I work hard to do it well.

      After a short while she pushes my hand away and we play at something else. I don’t mind because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what we have done. It’s just a game and we simply play another one that she likes.

      * * *

      By the time I’m seven, I know that Mum is drinking regularly. It isn’t happening all the time – certainly not every day – and a lot remains hidden from me. I don’t see her starting to drink. I only see the results when she has drunk a whole bottle. She is never just slightly drunk or tipsy: she is either sober or completely smashed.

      In a rare moment of confession much later on in her life, she tells me that her main problem is that when she’s opened a bottle of brandy she can’t stop drinking it until it’s empty.

      Once drunk, she completely loses control, not just of her emotions but also her body.

      And something else happens when she drinks in the evening. I remember the first time it happened . . .

      * * *

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