the postmark, which said somewhere in Cornwall. Not so very far away. But far enough.

I love my mum, but I can’t really remember her. Not properly.

There are two photos of her on my pinboard.

In the first, she’s standing in the rain on a pavement in Birmingham, hand in hand with Dad. It’s their wedding picture, taken just outside the registry office, twelve and a half years ago.

Mum is tiny and elfin with startling lilac-coloured hair, all braided and beaded and hanging down around her shoulders. She’s wearing what looks like a lace tablecloth. It was a lace tablecloth, Dad told me. It cost a quid in a charity shop, and she made it into a weird, dip-hemmed number and wore it over a purple sack-dress, with purple and black stripy tights and Doc Marten boots.

Dad looks just as scary. He’s so young and skinny and smiley, in patched, worn-out jeans and a vast, black mohair jumper. His hair is dyed ketchup-red, and it stands straight up as if he’d just stuck his fingers in an electric socket.

I’m in this picture, too, hidden away under the lace tablecloth. I’m just a bump, a secret, impossible to see because of the way Mum’s holding her flowers (dandelions, along with some orange daisy-things pinched from the local park). All the same, I’m there, and I bet I’m the reason they’re standing there in the rain, smiling at the camera and brushing confetti out of their hair.

Five months later, there I am for real, in the second photo. I’m a few weeks old, a small, angry face with black button eyes and a shock of dark hair, dressed in something bright and stripy. Mum’s face gazes up at the camera, looking pale and bewildered, her lilac hair chopped short now, tousled and scruffy. I’ve looked hard at that picture for signs of blissed-out motherly love and all that happy-families stuff, but Mum just looks lost, unhappy.

She left when I was four.

I don’t remember, of course, but by then we’d lived in a bus, a caravan, a squat, a council flat. We toured the music festivals, Mum and Dad selling lentil soup, dreamcatchers, scented candles, handmade earrings. They worked in an organic vegetable garden, a wholefood café, a clog workshop, a pottery. They signed on the dole and lived on social security and bought me second-hand shoes and forgot to brush my hair so it got all matted and fluffy and made old ladies at bus stops tut and shake their heads.

They tried, Dad said, to give me a name, a family, a future. She tried. Must try harder, like my maths teacher says.

When I was four, she ran away with a bloke called Mitch. He was taking a Volkswagen camper van to Kathmandu, and Mum must have thought that sounded better than another ten or fifteen years of wiping my nose and not brushing my hair and reading me stories about fluffy bunnies. She kissed me extra hard one night, and told me she loved me, and in the morning she was gone.

We managed, Dad and me. We stayed in the council flat and I started school and he started college, doing ceramics, which is just a fancy name for pottery. I made friends with Sara and Sasha and Jade, and Dad made mugs and bowls and wiggly-edged plates all glazed with speckly stuff. He also made beautiful models of elves and fairies and sad-faced mermaids, and all of them looked a bit like Mum, but I never mentioned that.

He finished his course and we rented a place with a workshop attached, and after a while he made enough money for us to live on, selling the wiggly-edged bowls and plates to craft shops and the elfy-things to posh shops and galleries. We stopped eating lentil stew every day and progressed to French bread, oven chips and frozen vegetable lasagne, and we were happy. Mostly.

Last Christmas, Dad bought me pink flowery fairy lights, and I draped them all around my pinboard, the board where I’ve stuck all my postcards, along with the hat and the photos and the loved-up raggy doll.

‘Looks like some kind of Hindu shrine,’ Dad said when he saw it, and it does, a bit, but that’s how I like it.

It’s all I’ve got of my mum.

‘Hey, Dizzy! Wake up, birthday girl!’

Dad brings me breakfast in bed on my birthday, every year. And every year, I hide under the covers and pretend I haven’t been lying awake, thinking about Mum. I