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little away from me. I see his face in the mirror, but his reflected image is strange to me, reversed and subtly wrong. The darkness reaches out to me from the corners of the room.
    ‘You’re a bit of a perfectionist,’ he says. ‘We both know that. You want everything to be just right, you can’t justgo with the flow. That’s understandable. It’s perhaps one of the effects of…’ His voice tails off.
    ‘One of the effects of what?’ My voice is small in the stillness.
    ‘Darling,’ he says. ‘You know I think you’re a wonderful mother. No one could care for those girls better than you. But maybe sometimes you try almost too hard.’
    His eyes are narrow: for a moment he looks at me as though I am a stranger.
    ‘How can you try too hard?’ I say.
    ‘All I mean is—of course it’s a worrying situation. But you get worried perhaps a bit more than you need to. And maybe in some ways that makes things worse. Maybe you expect things to go wrong.’
    There’s a sense of pressure in my chest, like something pushing into me, making it hard to breathe.
    ‘I just don’t see how that could make Daisy ill,’ I say.
    He hears the catch in my voice. He comes to sit beside me.
    ‘Cat,’ he says, ‘now don’t go getting upset.’
    He ruffles my hair, as though I am a child. His hand on me soothes me, as he knows it will.
    ‘What about the hospital?’ he says.
    ‘We’re getting the referral.’
    ‘Well, that’s all that matters really,’ he says.
    ‘What if she puts it in the letter—that she thinks it’s psychological? They won’t take Daisy seriously. If they think that, no one’ll bother to try and find out what’s wrong.’
    ‘Of course she won’t put it in the letter,’ he says. ‘Imean, these are the experts, aren’t they? She’ll leave them to make up their own minds. None of this adds up to anything,’ he says, and puts his arm around me. Yet still I feel that something has been broken.

CHAPTER 9
    T here’s a road I won’t go down. Poplar Avenue. A harmless name, a name like any other. There’s a house in that road, a wide-fronted house set well back from the street. There are rooms in that house with glass-panelled doors, the panels covered over with brown paper. Richard started to drive down Poplar Avenue once, by mistake, when we were coming home from Gina and Adrian’s, and a car crash in the one-way system had caused a massive tailback. He turned round when he realised: he knows, I’ve told him some of it, and he read about it in the papers duringthe inquiry. But nobody knows all of it, except those of us who were there.
    I was thirteen when I went there. My mother couldn’t cope with me—or so she told the social worker, as I lurked behind the bead curtain in the squalid kitchen of our tiny flat, that I’d tried to clean up, knowing the social worker was coming, hearing everything. ‘I need a break,’ said my mother. ‘Just for a month or two. To get myself together.’
    The social worker said she admired my mother’s honesty, and it probably was for the best. She asked if there was anyone I could go to. ‘No,’ said my mother, ‘we only have each other.’ The social worker said not to worry, she was pretty sure that there was a place at The Poplars. And I wouldn’t even need to change schools, so really it didn’t have to be too disruptive.
    My mother was drinking three bottles of sherry a day. It had crept up on us gradually, through the years of living in rented flats, or in rooms at the tops of pubs where she worked behind the bar. I knew the story of how we came to be in this predicament—or, at least, the part of it she chose to tell. Her family had been reasonably well-off—her father was a cabinet-maker—but they’d been Plymouth Brethren, very strict and excluding. She’d always chafed against it—the beliefs, the extreme restrictions. She’d truanted a lot, left school to travel round Europe with an unemployed actor, ten years older than her,