Celestine had ballet. Designer clothes. Birthday parties with a marquee in the garden. Trips.
I had heavy aluminium crutches that never fitted properly, because a decent prosthetic was, in my mother’s words, an unnecessary expense at your age.
When guests came, I was sent upstairs.
Stay out of sight. We don’t need everybody asking uncomfortable questions about your leg.
She was not protecting me. She was embarrassed by me. I understood the difference by about eleven.
PART 2
When I was sixteen they hired a photographer for a formal family portrait.
I was trying to cross the living room quietly, out of the way, and the tip of my crutch slipped on the polished floor.
A glass of red wine went over and across my mother’s white cashmere rug.
I hit the floor hard. My hip was black for a fortnight.
My father never asked whether I was hurt.
He went into the kitchen and came back carrying a black rubbish bag and pushed it against my chest.
He said: we are sick of carrying you.
He said: pack your things and get out.
For a second I thought he was just angry and it would pass, the way things did.
Then my mother walked over and opened the front door.
That was when I understood.
Celestine was fourteen. She was sitting on the sofa looking at her nails, and she did not look up.
Not when he said it. Not when the door opened. Not when I went past her with the bag.
I put three changes of clothes into it. That was more or less everything I owned.
Sixteen years old. One leg. Two crutches that did not fit. One bin bag.
I walked nearly two miles to my aunt’s house.
Norah was my mother’s estranged sister and I had met her perhaps six times in my life.
She opened the door, looked at me for about one second, and pulled me inside.
She did not interrogate me. She did not ring my mother. She put the kettle on and then she went and made up the spare room while I sat at her kitchen table not talking.
She took me to have my crutches properly fitted, which took forty minutes and which nobody had done in six years. She bought me clothes. She got me back into school.
She became, over about two years, the mother I had not had.
