PART 1
I grew up in care.
If you have, you know the thing where you get placed, and it goes well for four months, and then one evening it stops going well and nobody can quite tell you why, and you are back in a minibus with a bag on your knees.
Three times for me. The third one lasted eleven months and I still think about their kitchen.
That is also where I met my husband. He was in the same place. Two of us out of about forty in that building.
We fell in love properly, later, at nineteen, and it was not complicated at all.
Neither of us had a career. I was on a till at a supermarket on Marner Street. He fixed cars.
We got married and rented a decent flat and had Hattie, and for about three years we were as happy as I have ever been in my life and I knew it at the time, which people say you never do.
Then he got ill.
We fought it for a year. Every treatment they offered, every appointment, every second opinion we could get a referral for.
None of it worked and he passed in the March.
I was twenty-nine, buried in debt, with a one-year-old.
I took the first job I could get, which was housekeeping for a man called Ambrose Vane. Seventy-two, widowed, living on his own in a big house at the end of a lane.
What that job paid did not cover half of what I owed.
Then Hattie got properly unwell and I could not afford what she had been prescribed, and I want to describe what that is actually like, because people hear it and picture a difficult month.
It is standing at a counter with a prescription and a card, and moving your thumb over the amount on the screen, and doing arithmetic that you already know the answer to.
And that same fortnight my landlord told me I had a month.
I asked him for more time. Actually asked, on a doorstep, with my daughter on my hip, which I had promised myself I would never do.
He said no. He was not unkind about it. He said no and then he said he was sorry and then he went back inside.
I had nowhere to go, and about eleven days of thinking about it, and then I stopped sleeping properly.
