For most boys, your mum taking you shopping can be embarrassing, right? She makes you try on dead clothes. You have to go into shops that are just for ladies. And you don’t even want to think about what would happen if you ran into your mates. Then you’d really be in trouble.

I should have been ecstatic to go shopping with my mum though; after all, she hadn’t taken me out for years, this woman who looked and sounded so familiar, whose presence had dragged up memories lost to that hidden corner of my mind, who despite this was still a stranger. A stranger I was desperate to get to know.

And it happened this way. I couldn’t wait to spend the day with her, but by the end I just wanted to disappear, to be anywhere else except shopping with my mum.

It was our first Saturday morning back together. Em had a mountain of homework so he stayed at home. If he had come it might not have been so bad.

We needed some new clothes for Grace, some food, and trainers for me. Mine had reached the end of their lives weeks ago, needing to be resuscitated every morning.

I carried her black-and-brown trolley down the stairs, three flights, then on to the street. She had Grace in a long, patterned sling. My sister was asleep. She slept a lot. Is that usual for babies?

‘Thank you, Prince,’ my mum said.

I smiled in reply.

We walked to the high street. My mum said we could get the bus back – she checked her purse as she said this, and then put it back into the folds of her traditional dress. I knew money was tight: the flat was sparse, the furniture threadbare and my stomach rumbled, like it hadn’t done in all the months that I lived with Ruth and Jubrel. But it was a mission to the high street.

My mother asked me lots about school as we walked, my friends, my teachers, and the things I was good at.

‘You were always good at sports, Prince,’ she replied with a laugh.

She kept singing snatches of songs. I didn’t know what to think of this. It was nice to hear her happy, and her voice teased out snippets of memory, each bringing a new smile to my face. People did give us strange looks though. Grace slept the whole way, strapped across my mum, along the main road, under the railway bridge, past the tube station.

When we finally arrived I showed Mum, through the bustle of people, the shop where Ruth had bought my last pair of trainers. I thought they had been cheap, but just about passable as cool. Ruth had said they were ‘smart enough’.

We looked in at row upon row of gleaming shoes.

‘Come on,’ I said, then pulled my mum inside.

As soon as we passed the security barriers, I knew what I wanted. Sparkling white, big green laces and a fluorescent tick, glimmered at me from across the shop.

‘These are well nice, Mum,’ I said, pointing them out. I said this quietly, we weren’t the only customers. A group of boys were trying on caps, further into the shop, by the counter. Cool-looking boys, a few years older than me, they all had the best trainers money could buy.

‘Hmm.’ She made a noise, which didn’t mean anything to me. Then she went over and picked them up.

‘What?’ She said this loudly, and several of the boys looked over. ‘They cost how much?’ She let out a big snort. I wasn’t getting those trainers, that was clear.

As I tried to look cool, in spite of the trolley I was still pulling, my mum turned and glared around the shop. She walked to another shelf and picked up a disgusting shoe.

This was too much. ‘No, Mum,’ I hissed.

‘Excuse me.’ She still refused to talk quietly, or even at a normal volume. She shouted, ‘You do not say no to me, young man.’ I didn’t know why her mood had changed so quickly. What had upset her? She stared at me hard, then glanced at the price. ‘No, these are no good,’ she called out. Grace let out a small whimper from within her sling. I let out a sigh.

I could hear the gang with the caps laughing, but I couldn’t even glance at them. I tried to hide myself behind the rack of ‘sale’ shoes my mum was looking at.

She picked up several more, declaring they were no good as soon as she looked at the price.

‘There is nothing here,’ she finally stated as a shop assistant approached us.

‘Can I help you at all?’ the lady asked.

My mother smiled at her and said, ‘No, thank you very much.’ Then we left.

‘Why did you take us in there, Prince? That was no good,’ was the first thing she said to me when we got outside.

I shrugged, then neither of us spoke. I felt a bit sick. I had never been that embarrassed.

We ended up buying everything from the market. Lengths of cloth to make Grace some clothes, blue plastic bags of vegetables and a small piece of meat, and the ugliest, most clumpy, malformed, black school shoes that I had ever seen. How could I wear those monstrosities to school? I would get laughed out of the playground. My embarrassment was reaching new heights.

We did get the bus home, but we didn’t talk like we had on the way out. I lugged the trolley on board while my mum paid the driver. She sat down in a seat right at the front. Grace had started to stir, so Mum began to unravel her from the sling and motioned for me to find a seat further back.

I did as I was told; I didn’t really want to sit next to her anyway. But after a few minutes I realised I had sat down next to the wrong person – you know, the person on the bus who talks to themselves. The person that no one looks at, that you try to forget exists, the one who occasionally calls out to apparently imaginary people.

In this instance it was a very small, old, white lady. She wore a woollen hat and she seemed to be muttering numbers to herself as she tapped her palm with her index finger.

I looked over at my mother. I could see that she was singing under her breath as she fed Grace. How do people see my mum? I wondered. Was she the person you didn’t dare look at, or the lady that the groups of teenagers sniggered at?

I realised that I did not know this woman I called Mum. I did not know what she had gone through. I did not know why she had changed so much from the singing voice in my memories.

We were strangers.