“I DON’T BELIEVE A WORD OF IT!”

“I promise you, it’s true. Look, he’s written me a poem.”

My mother took the piece of paper I held out to her with a grimace of disgust mingled with incredulity. She looked horrified but also a tiny bit jealous. After all, when she’d offered to give the writer a lift home that evening, and when he’d accepted in such suave tones, she could well have imagined that he wasn’t entirely impervious to her charms. At first, stunned by the revelation that I had, somewhat precociously, become her rival, she refused to believe it. She swiftly regained her composure, and then spat out a word I could not believe could be associated with G.:

“Are you aware he’s a pedophile?”

“A what? Is that why you offered to give him a lift home, and let him sit in the back with your daughter?”

Without missing a beat, she told me she was going to send me to boarding school. Beneath the rafters, our screams flew thick and fast. How could she think of depriving me of this, my first, my last, my only love? Did she really imagine that, having deprived me of my father (because, obviously, now it was all her fault), I was going to allow her to do it a second time? I would never agree to be apart from him. I would rather die.