Nora, 2
Her mind is coming together. It’s not that long ago that if her mum put her hands over her face and said peekaboo, Nora did not know where she had gone, and if she would ever come back.
‘Oh, she’s shy, isn’t she?’ they say.
‘She really doesn’t leave your side,’ they say.
‘Oh, bless, she’s hiding,’ they say.
‘Come out,’ they say. ‘We won’t hurt you.’
How does Nora know? Even Auntie Cee and Uncle Augie she’s unsure of, and they at least look like her mother. The woman called Nanny didn’t last a day. Why would Nora want anyone other than her mum?
Then there was the nursery. Nora didn’t know what nursery was. At the settling-in session, it had seemed like any other room. When her mother had left her for that first half-day, she’d panicked, clawed at the window, cried so hard she couldn’t breathe.
No more nursery. No more Nanny.
What to do with Nora?
Everyone says this. Her mum’s sister and her mum’s friend Maisie and, once, after bedtime, her mum.
Because her mum has to work, whatever that is, and her mum has to take Nora with her.
And then everyone wants a piece of Nora’s mum, and Nora just wants her mum to herself.
So Nora cries, and all the people stare.
They say that Nora’s mum looks tired. That she looks sad, that the lack of sleep is taking its toll, that she’s working herself to the bone.
Nora’s mum forgets things, loses things, breaks things, is ill all the time because Nora is always eating things off the floor, forever leaving a trail of snot wherever she goes.
I knew I couldn’t have it all, her mum had said to Maisie, and she’d been smiling, but she was smiling through tears.
Nora knows that tears are sad. She gives her mum a toy, because she wants her to be happy. What will make her mum happy?