I didn’t like the blank eyes of the page turned on me, the attention narrowed into a thin dart, the way people commented when they saw us in bookshops or at Mum’s events. When I was five I wept and wept until Mum said she wouldn’t draw me for a year, and then the images had been only of September, scaling trees or swimming in the school pool to find a key that had dropped to the bottom and would open a locked box. Except a year later Mum was drawing me again and I’d felt—though silently this time—the same way.
