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If I was working in one of those swanky Soho ad agencies and I was doing consumer profiling, like where you divide people into groups according to what trousers they wear and if they’re ever likely to buy fish fingers from the freezer compartment, this is how I’d profile my mum.

 AGE: 35-45

 SEX: female

 HEIGHT: 1.7 metres

 WEIGHT: 50-60 kilograms depending

 ANNUAL INCOME: under £15,000

 PROFESSION: classroom assistant. Sometimes she says she’d like to spend a whole week just talking to grown ups and not wiping anybody’s nose, but the job fits in with Jed’s school day and she likes it mostly.

 STATUS: married (estranged probably)

 ON THE STEREO: old stuff. Some of it I like. Some of it is diabolical.

 LEISURE ACTIVITIES: walking on the heath, swimming at the Lido (summer only), reading, knitting, learning to sew, yoga, aggressive cleaning.

If I was working at an ad agency I don’t think I’d go crazy about someone like my mum. I might half-heartedly throw a few bath oils or cleaning products or hair dye her way, but she wouldn’t have much to spend so I wouldn’t waste too much effort.

This would be my big mistake.

My mum is buying stuff all the time.

If there’s a bogus new miracle product on the TV, me and Mercy place bets on how long before Mum buys it. Our bathroom cupboard is spilling over with twenty-four-hour moisturisers, anti-wrinkle creams, cellulite busters and hair thickeners.

Mum says she used to be a beautiful woman, but having three kids and an absent husband has ruined her looks. She says that it’s harder than you’d think to have looks and then lose them, and Mercy says she should try just being ugly all her life and that’s no picnic. Mum says Mercy has low self-esteem. If you ask me, low self-esteem is what most girls live on, instead of food.

The main thing about my mum is that she’s sad. Life isn’t turning out for her the way it was supposed to. She blames Dad for a lot of it, of course, his old friends and us, and also she blames herself.

I know this for a fact, not because she ever told me but because she told Bob Cutforth. A lot. Whenever he came over for dinner they would get wasted together and I would listen outside the kitchen door because when people are wasted they talk about stuff they can’t talk about when they are sober. Once I heard Mum say to Bob that she’d spent the last year they were together hoping Dad would disappear off the face of the earth because she couldn’t stand how things were between them. She said she’d wanted to be free from the job of loving him because he made it such hard work. In her fantasy of being on her own she blossomed (Mum’s word) and did all the things she’d always blamed Dad for stopping her doing. But in reality, when he disappeared she was less than she’d been before, not more.

Remembering that conversation is like being there listening to it for the first time. The line of my spine feels caught, like I need to stretch it, my stomach is a hole, I’m listening to my own breathing and the big wall clock in the hall, and I’m staring at the streaks and blisters in the paint on the kitchen door and thinking I might kick it down and punch my mum in the face for wishing my dad away.

They’re quiet for a bit and then Bob says to her, “You didn’t make him go, Nicky. What did you do? You loved him and you loved his kids. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

Mum started crying then, just softly, and I went upstairs to my room and thought about what it was like to be her, and if her and Bob would end up getting married.

Another time, when I was sitting right there with them at the table, she said to Bob, “I wasn’t as good a wife as you all thought I was you know,” and then she went on about how much she hated being stuck at home with the kids and how she resented Dad’s great job and how she made him pay all the time and was insanely jealous and always thought he was playing around and how she was basically never happy at what turned out to be the happiest time of her life. Bob said she shouldn’t talk about that stuff in front of me, and she said, “Lucas is nearly thirteen and his dad’s left us, so he’s the man of the house now.” Then she ruffled my hair and told me to go to bed, like I was eight, which hacked me off because I was a man when it suited her and a kid when it didn’t.

She’s better now than she was then.

But the thing about my mum that still bothers me is that people mostly feel sorry for her and she lets them. Mum reckons life dealt her a bad hand, which is a good way of saying that her absent husband, her three kids and the fact that she’s not twenty-one any more are not her fault. I want to ask her if women in places like Sudan or Palestine or Kosovo worry as much about face cream and stretch marks and living without a man around, but I haven’t yet, and who knows, maybe they do.

And sometimes Mum gets angry with the wrong people – meaning those who are still here as opposed to he who has left. Some days I know as soon as I look at her that I’m not going to get a civil word out of Mum at all. Even just the sound of our voices makes her roll her eyes and tut and act like we’re squatters in her actual brain, and not people with as much right to be and speak as she has. On a bad day like that you can tell she’s programmed herself just to say NO to everything, practically before she’s heard it, which means she loses out when we’re saying do you want anything from the shop, or offering to put the dinner on.

What I think on days like that is this.

Maybe life didn’t turn out the way Mum planned, but it’s not our fault. Unless the thing we did wrong was being born, and if you start from there you can never do anything right, no matter how hard you try.