When I lost my mother in the store, I was only three years old. I can't remember what happened but I still wake up in a sweat most nights, an innate sense of abandonment, as though I have been on a mission to the moon, stepped outside the spaceship for a walk across the lunar landscape and left behind. Terror.
Mother never recovered from her fear. She spent the rest of my childhood in a daze from a mix of prescription pill cocktails, agrophobia and alcohol. Dangerous combinations.
She was currently in a secure medical facility, unrecognisable from the pretty...