I wake with my sheets knotted around me on my mother’s floor.

Oh God.

The throbbing is pressing into the backs of my eyes. Even my eyebrows are hurting. Mum’s looking down at where I lie. She seems calmer now. Much calmer than she has been over the past few days. The past few months, really.

‘Good morning, my evil spawn,’ she greets me with a raised eyebrow. I recognise that wry, sad sort of humour she used to have when I was still small enough to crawl into her lap, before the alcohol and hangovers chased all her humour away.

Oh God.

Did last night actually happen?

The memory of it keeps bashing against my brain in awful, awful flashbacks. Dancing on the table. Threatening to hit Cassie. Trying to kiss Noah, and the way he looked at me, like I was a rotted old possum corpse.

Oh God.

I’m such a loser. I’m the queen of losers. I should wear a crown. Mum strokes my sweaty head and I stare up at her face.

‘You don’t look like yourself today. You actually look half okay. Did we do a body swap?’ I groan.

She arches her eyebrows at me again. ‘You proved your point spectacularly.’

I make a tortured sound, and drag myself up to my feet. I’m only five foot two but it feels like I have vertigo. From her seated position, Mum hands me some Gatorade, and I gulp it down. My mouth feels like I’ve swallowed fistfuls of sand. I catch my reflection in Mum’s cracked dresser mirror.

Oh God.

My hair is all matted like a rat’s nest, and it smells like one too, that sour, mousy smell. Oh wait, that’s vomit. My face looks all puffy, and my eyes are sunken into my face, like two large yellow swamps. They look stagnant.

‘How do you do it?’ I ask Mum. ‘How can you stand drinking this much every day?’

She shoots me that sad, half smile again.

‘As they say, practise, practise, practise,’ she replies dryly. I groan again, half at her awful attempt at a joke, and half because last night’s alcohol feels like it’s having a brawl with my stomach. I sink back down to the floor.

‘Want your mum to make you some scrambled eggs to soak it all up? All you have to do is unchain me . . .’

‘I’m weak, but not that weak. A beer every two hours for you.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Uh huh. But could you be a less sadistic jailer and let me have a shower?’ She screws her nose up while picking at her t-shirt. ‘I think I’m going to have to actually peel off these bloody clothes from my skin.’

I consider her request. She does smell pretty ripe, although it’s not like I can talk.

‘Fine. But the leg chain stays on so I can catch you if you run.’

She sighs.

‘Kirra, this is ridiculous, you know. Not to mention really illegal. I mean, really illegal.’

I chew my lip and shrug.

‘I know. You can have me arrested when I let you go in . . .’ I count in my head how many more days of the detox are left to go. ‘Five days. When the grog is all out of your system.’

She looks hard at me, like she’s only now really looking at me for the first time.

‘There are other ways to go about this, you know. Most sane children would get adult help.’

What can I tell her? Most sane children don’t have ghosts in phone boxes telling them what to do? More sane kids have parents who help them out with their problems, instead of causing their problems? I pick at my nails and avoid eye contact.

‘I tried to get Lark to help me, but he didn’t want to hear about it. He wouldn’t even let me live with him.’

Mum’s face crumples when it dawns on her that I’d asked to live with Lark instead of her. It’s as though I’ve slapped her. There’s an aching silence, until line by line, she pulls her features back into a neutral position, blinking away her tears and pretending she had something in her eye to quickly wipe away the moisture.

‘Yeah, well, Lark’s bloody hopeless, isn’t he?’ she sighs, puncturing the silence.

‘Bloody oath.’

We lock eyes, each of us letting a small, wry smile seep onto our faces. I bite my lip.

‘Okay, shower time,’ I tell her. ‘Then breakfast. I hope you’re going to be as charming company as you were yesterday. I mean, your insults were definitely creative.’

She stifles a surprised, rusty laugh.

‘Have you ever seen the movie Rosemary’s Baby?’ she asks me, mock seriously. It’s a movie about a pregnant woman who gives birth to the devil’s child. I stick my tongue out at her, and despite my throbbing head, strangling shame and flashes of nausea, I have a feeling that today is going to be a lot better than yesterday.

We spend the day watching old movies and eating lots of greasy food. I even suggest hiring Rosemary’s Baby from the video store, but she just rolls her eyes and throws the pillow at me.

When I crack open the beers for her every two hours the smell of it triggers my gag reflex. I can’t stand the idea of cleaning out her toilet buckets today so I unchain her whenever she wants to go to the bathroom, and she surprises me by coming back each time, patiently sitting still as I padlock the chain back around the end of her bed. Willow doesn’t call me, and neither does Noah, not that I’d expect either of them to. Every time I think of last night another little corner inside me dies, and I’m not sure whether the hangover or the shame hurts more. Mum asks me for more alcohol every now and again – just one more glass – but I ignore her, and after a few muttered insults under her breath she drops the subject.

The next few days pass pretty much the same. Mum gets two drinks less every day, and we’re both getting cabin fever pretty badly. Especially as she’s more or less sober most of the time now. She clocks me twitching my leg, the way I do when I’m restless.

‘It’s the holidays, love, go out and hang with your friends. Even dungeon masters need lives, you know,’ Mum tells me after we’ve both killed fifteen minutes painting our toenails a shade of pink that makes our toes look like small fat piglets. Cotton balls are wedged between our toes, and I’ve done such a rotten job of keeping inside the lines that my toes look less piglet-y and more pig massacre-y. I sigh.

‘The thing is, I’m between friends at the moment . . .’ I scrunch my face at her. ‘I’ve taken to chaining people up just to have company, really.’

She throws me a concerned look, which looks strange on her, that concern for me. I almost don’t recognise her as my mother.

‘But you’re such a sweet girl . . .’ she falters ‘. . .when you’re not, you know, keeping prisoners and all of that shit.’

I blow on my toenails to try to keep my emotion in check, forcing my words to be bright and breezy. ‘Don’t worry, this whole chaining people up thing is just a phase.’

‘Nice to hear it. Although I’d rather you rebelled by dying your hair blue, or getting a nose piercing or something, like most bloody teenagers.’

‘Yeah well, I’m pretty unique, apparently,’ I reply, and that makes me think of Noah, and how the afternoon of the speech seems like a million years ago. I think of how happiness is such a slippery thing, like trying to catch a fish with your fingers. All you can do is watch it swim away, and get on with things, and hope that one day it comes back to you. I sigh. I doubt Noah will ever look at me the same way again. That fish has well and truly swum.

I think of something to pass the afternoon, and with the cotton balls still between my toes, I hobble to my bedroom and come back with the book from the library that Mrs Darnell suggested for me – The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

‘I thought I could read you this. Mrs Darnell told me it used to be your favourite,’ I tell her. I pass it over to her, and she runs her hand slowly across the cover, as though she’s wiping off the years that have gathered upon it like dust.

‘Jesus, I haven’t read this since I was a teenager. I used to love to read. I was smart too, once upon a time. It wasn’t your father you inherited your brains from, that’s for sure.’

‘She told me you used to go to the library all the time, with some friend called Rob, apparently. Oh, and she said to tell you hi.’

I’m not sure what I said, but something inside of her breaks. I can almost hear the crack. She drops the book and her face looks like every muscle, every sinew, has been pulled taut. It’s frightening.

‘Get me a drink, Kirra.’ She starts pulling on her chain. ‘I’ve bloody had enough, do you hear me? Stop this! Get this damned chain off of me!’ Her voice is a cut-glass shrill. She’s struggling, and her ankle is going red from the way she’s pulling at the chain. She has that wild look in her eyes, like someone else has stepped into her skin. Someone who scares me. Up until now, I would have ignored her tantrums, I would have stepped over her like she was a puddle on the floor, and let it play itself out, but I don’t do that now. I get close to her, even though she’s hitting at me, and I wrap my arms around her so she can’t lash out at me anymore. I have my small, sobbing mother wrapped up in my arms, so tight, like the way I held onto my dolls as a small child. I have her in a huge bear hug.

‘I love you, Mum. Please stop this. I love you,’ I repeat to her, rocking her, and slowly, she stops convulsing. Slowly, she looks up at me, and the blinds lift up from behind her eyes, and I know my mother is back. I don’t ask what memories were just clawing inside her skin. I just let her go gently, like she was something precious and fragile, and I kiss her on the forehead and pick up the library book from the floor.

‘The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath,’ I begin, in a small, steady voice. ‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York . . .’

Mum closes her eyes and listens, as my words rise up and are sliced to pieces by the blades of the overhead fan. I can almost feel the shards of them fall down to settle on my shoulders.