She grew up as a kind of indentured child servant to her family, but my mother raised me more like a sister. In fact, for us, every role was amorphous and malleable
My mother lay on her back in the water, pink amid mountains of foam, as steamed as a dumpling, dictating her thoughts to me. I was sat on the loo, taking notes with a biro, a secretary, a familiar, aware that elsewhere children my age were at their school desks studying Living Things and Their Habitats, glad I was not among them.
My mother said: “Write this down, la.”
