I always knew my mother had a secret.
She guarded it fiercely, keeping it under lock and key. That was how I envisioned it – a hidden chamber tucked away in the recesses of my mother’s twisted mind. But it was too big to be contained. It poisoned her thoughts and covered our family in darkness.
When I was 19, my mother accidentally gave me a clue to her past. I’d driven home after a panicked call from my father to say that she was having one of the emotional episodes we’d all come to dread.
I tiptoed into her dim bedroom, just making out my mother’s silhouette as she sat up in bed. She was holding a notepad. I immediately recognised her old-fashioned calligraphic script, deep indentations in the thinly-lined paper, along with dark smudges and small tears where it looked like a pencil might have broken.