Gram is making tea and I’m trying to behave as if this has not been the weirdest day of my whole life.

The radio is on. Gram always listens to Radio 3 or Classic FM. (She sometimes asks me if I know the composers and if it’s on the organ I usually guess ‘Bach’ and I’m right about half the time. She forgets the times I’m wrong, so she has this totally false idea that I know loads about classical music.)

Do you ever get that thing when someone’s being nice to you, and chatty and everything, but you just can’t be bothered? And you can’t say anything because that would just be rude, so you have to pretend to be paying attention by making the right noises? You know, raising your eyebrows and going ‘hmm!’ and stuff.

That’s what it’s like with Gram right now.

She’s wittering on about … Well, that’s the point. I’m not listening, so I don’t know what she’s wittering on about. I pick up ‘Reverend Robinson’ and something about his sermon that morning, then Mrs Abercrombie and the Food Bank Committee, and something to do with something else, and …

‘Are you all right, Ethel?’

‘Hmm? Yes, Gram, thanks. Fine.’

‘Only, I have just told you about Mrs Abercrombie’s Geoffrey and you haven’t said a thing.’

It turns out – because Gram tells me again, and this time I make sure to pay proper attention – that Mrs Abercrombie’s Yorkshire terrier, Geoffrey, has joined the list of local missing dogs.

I pretend to be sorry, but:

a) I am too tired to be bothered.

b) Geoffrey, despite having only three legs, is detestable and seems to have grown an extra load of temper to compensate for his missing front right leg.

And …

c) There is – obviously – only one thing on my mind.

You know I said I was done with crying?

Turns out I was wrong.

All my bubbling emotions overflow and I start sniffling at the kitchen table. I feel Gram’s arms round me, and she doesn’t even know what’s the matter.

‘It’s all right,’ she says, though how can she know?

I hug her back; it feels good. I can smell her tea-breath and her flowery, soapy scent. In that moment, in that hug, everything seems OK again, and I let myself briefly forget that everything is very far from OK. Hugs are good like that.

It gives me the strength for one more try.

‘Gram?’ I start. ‘You know I said this morning that I had become invisible …?’

I’m hoping she’ll listen while I offload everything that’s on my mind.

She doesn’t, though. Instead, she pulls up a chair next to me and carries on EXACTLY where she left off before: feeling that the world sometimes ignores you, the sense that you have to shout to make yourself heard, that people look straight through you as if you are invisible.

And so on. She’s being nice and everything, but it doesn’t help.

My mouth is full of the words I want to say:

‘No, Gram. I mean I was REALLY invisible.’

But I swallow them again.

‘I’m a bit tired, Gram,’ I say. ‘I’m just going to go to bed, I think.’

‘All right, pet,’ says Gram. ‘I’ll bring you up a cocoa.’

I go upstairs, and check myself over again and again in the big bathroom mirror. Everything seems to be back to normal – that is, there are no bits of me that are invisible.

What’s more, I think my spots are getting a bit better. No – really, they are. It’s not just my imagination.

I’m feeling very alone, and that makes me think of Mum.

I haven’t opened my shoebox of Mum stuff for ages. It’s there on the shelf, along with books and soft toys, and I get it down, open it up, and lay out the things.