A sexy picture, the message said. It took me a long time to get it right. I was so nervous that I kept dropping the phone or forgetting to smile. In most of them I looked frightened, as if kidnapped and forced to take the image by someone just out of sight of the camera. In all I looked haunted, barely there, ghostly the way I always felt in Mum’s picture books. I kept thinking about September speaking the book aloud using my voice, a voice so convincing that I didn’t even need to read my own parts. I thought: I need to go upstairs, get September, ask her to take it. But I didn’t. The texts
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