Colours get brighter and migraines intensify in certain climates, usually before thunderstorms. When the day is heavy and humid it feels like the clouds are crushing my skull, surrounding me as though I’m a mountain peak. There is little to feel positive about this aspect though it does come in handy for one thing.

  ‘I was thinking of asking Greg and Sarah around tonight for drinks,’ Andy says, spearing a potato and popping it in his mouth. ‘Weather’s good.’

  It’s so humid I feel like I can barely breathe. All the windows are open but there is no air.

  ‘Can Alva come too?’ Joy practically jumps out of her chair with excitement. She loves people. She needs to be around people.

  ‘Why isn’t Becky coming?’ Izzy asks with that whine, always the victim, as though we are plotting against her to remove life of all fun.

  ‘Of course Becky and Alva are invited,’ Andy says.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Can they bring their dog?’ Billy asks, and Joy and Izzy roll their eyes.

  ‘Who cares about their stupid dog?’ Joy says, and the three get into an argument about animal cruelty which leads to a debate about who walks and loves our dog the most.

  I feel a shot in my temple, in the side and back of my head, as though Andy has stabbed his fork through my skull and left it there, skewering my brain like a kebab. It’s been happening for a few days, not as intense as this, but it’s been building gradually.

  ‘Stop.’ I say it quietly but there must have been an edge to my voice because they stop and all look at me. ‘Not tonight,’ I say, looking out the window.

  They moan and groan. I ruin their life, I ruin their fun, I yada yada yada.

  ‘Weather isn’t due to break until tomorrow,’ Andy says. ‘We should do it tonight while we can. They had us over last time.’

  ‘It will break tonight,’ I say, barely able to hear my words over the sounds of the kids and the pain in my head.

  The kids’ colours rise and mesh in the centre of the table as they squabble. It could be pretty, a rainbow above my dinner table, if only my head didn’t hurt so much.

  We continue eating. I poke at my food, push it around the plate, watching their plates so we can hurry up and get this all over with. A dark room on my own calls me.

  ‘The steak tastes like feet,’ Joy says, and I don’t even bother to argue with her. I take her plate and bring it to the sink. It falls in and clatters loudly. They all turn to look at me and it’s as if someone suddenly pulls the skewer from my brain; my head feels like it’s bleeding and I feel dizzy and faint.

  ‘Mum?’ Billy asks.

  There’s a crack, which silences the kids. They look outside, and there’s a flash.

  ‘Lightning!’ Joy screams with delight, running to the window.

  ‘Thunder!’ Izzy follows her.

  ‘Did we take Betty in?’ Billy asks.

  ‘Betty! Here girl,’ Andy calls.

  Betty, our Dachshund, comes bounding in as fast as her little legs can carry her. Then the thunder rolls dramatically, the kids whoop and holler, and Betty halts and scrambles in the opposite direction. The light outside looks purple. I feel like my head cracks with the lightning. My head tightens and tightens, then suddenly the sky opens up and it lashes rain; heavy, fat, determined drops bucket down relentlessly, soaking everything in seconds, and I feel the tension slowly start to ease from my head, like a screw being loosened, easing the pressure.

  Joy turns away from the window with a dark and mysterious look on her face. She slowly raises a finger and points at me. ‘The wise one has spoken again. Barbecue tomorrow night.’

  And we all dissolve into fits of giggles.

  To think there was a time when this haunted me, and when it can still haunt me, but now I have all this. I once thought it would be one or the other, but I can have this and still live. They have the power to make what’s heavy and all-consuming so light and unimportant. They make the tiny joyful things so phenomenally everything to me. They don’t even know what they do for me. They have loved me into shape.

  It’s a crisp autumn day and Joy and I are bundled up in coats and hats, walking through the woods. We hike together, it’s how we talk. It’s how she prefers to communicate anyway, through movement. Her predominant colours are and always have been vibrant, energetic, full of mischief and adventure. But today I can’t help but notice how they’ve dulled.

  Joy is a talker, the type of person who thinks aloud in order to figure herself out. She talks about everything that happened leading up to the bothersome event, everything surrounding the event and then finally we get to what actually happened. She has always been an exuberant child, never one to shy away from the details, she must get it all out in order to make sense of anything. To see if the unrelated is related, if the feels match the thinks, and it all must be aloud and in circles and repeated, until it’s gone. Andy gets swept up in her tornados, feels dizzy in the eye of it, but I must be the calm in her storm. She too gets motion sickness from herself, too much too fast, but I know to stop her, steady her, direct her gaze to a still spot on the horizon. Maybe that spot is me. I’ve learned to be patient, and understand that the preamble is important on her amble.

  The woodland floor is spongy beneath my hiking boots with soil, leaves and moss. The trees’ roots reach far beneath like a web under the surface, popping up occasionally to threaten to trip me, or offer a step up. Walking in nature continues to nurture me as it did in the early days of caring for Lily. It’s a habit that never left me, one of the few good habits I learned during those days. And like everything else with my aura seeing as I’ve aged, my experience with it has intensified. Today the floor is ripe with mushrooms, incredible looking fungi, some that look like they’re lifted straight from a cartoon, others from your worst nightmares. While I want to stop to examine them, Joy is intent on motoring on, not really seeing anything around her but enjoying the adrenaline that motion gives her.

  I don’t just see the colours of the fungi, I feel the connection of the trees beneath my feet, as they communicate with each other, using the mushrooms as messengers. I can see the thread-like colours running beneath the soil, millions of them shooting in different directions in a complicated network, like the hectic London Underground.

  ‘So it’s over between you?’ I ask, when Joy’s finally reached her point and finished describing the main event. I try to hide the hope from my voice. I never liked him from the start. I didn’t get to know him, a decision that I’m most certain was his, but I soaked up what I could in the short appearances he made in our lives, and from the times I watched from afar. Too much murky orange revealed his territorial nature and controlling sensibilities.

  ‘Yes,’ she cries, dissolving again, but manages to speed up. ‘And now I can’t go back to the gym anymore, I’ll have to find a new job and I really love working at this gym. I’ve built up all my clients. He’s such a prick; he’s already making life difficult for me. What will I do?’

  Hub trees, also known as ‘mother trees’ are the older, larger trees with roots that are deeper in the soil, giving them access to more nutrients to pass on to the smaller trees. They take the distress signals from their fungal connections and send help. Complex symbiotic relationships. Secret signals, silent distress calls. It happens below the surface and above.

  That’s motherhood.

  We reach an intersection in the woods, we can take right for a shorter journey back to the car, or left. Joy sniffles beside me.

  I choose left.

  Billy, a teenager, returns home from school surrounded by black. It terrifies me. His face dissolves into silent tears as soon as he sees me. He tries to escape to his room but I won’t let him.

  ‘What’s wrong, love? What happened?’

  His body heaves as he sobs in my arms, crying like a wounded animal, a little boy who has fallen over and cut his leg, if only it were so simple now. It’s so raw it comes from the depths of his soul. I feel his pain, his deep unhappiness, a huge tragic hole in him.

  ‘Oh baby,’ I say, squeezing him tight, wrapping him in my love. The aches and pains of growing up, of living, the horrible things that people do to each other.

  I spent most of my early life avoiding anyone and everyone’s colours, but what I learn when I have children is that I’d take every single colour away from them, every single shade, and give it to myself, to make life easier for them. For a moment at least, his pain is shared with me as we sit on the couch, entwined bodies and energies, the way it was when he was a bud inside me. I’d take all the pain away from them in a heartbeat if I could. I would live with it all if it meant they didn’t have to for a single day.

  It’s not always welcome, my aura-seeing. The first meeting with a boyfriend or girlfriend, for example. I somehow always seem to be the last one to meet anyone they care for deeply, the first one to meet somebody they’re not sure about. My viewpoints are not always believed or respected, my vision is questioned, depending on what I see, depending what their involvement is. I don’t ever tailor it to suit their requirements.

  ‘Don’t,’ Andy snaps at me in the car as we drive home from a visit to his sister in Glasgow.

  ‘But don’t you want to know? She says these things and yet—’

  ‘Don’t,’ he says again, louder, dark and brooding, eyes disappeared beneath his eyebrows and frown. ‘Keep it to yourself.’

  The weather, he wants to know about. Other insights I must learn to keep to myself. People don’t always need or want to know everything.

  Izzy drops by unannounced. I happen to be looking out the upstairs window and see her car.

  ‘I’m not here!’ I call downstairs to Andy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not here!’

  ‘Why?’ he appears at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Izzy is outside. I don’t care what you say – tell her I’m in the bath or somewhere – but I can’t talk.’

  He laughs.

  Izzy has always been a complex child. The middle child, she’s difficult, was jealous of everything: time with others, other kids’ toys … She needed and still needs to be handled, treated as though fragile, tiptoed around like she’s living in the centre of a labyrinth made of eggshells. She’s heavy and she loads her heaviness on others. She misunderstands situations, misreads people, she is the victim in every circumstance, but with love, she can keep the darkness at bay. We couldn’t rescue Ollie, but as a mother I can make sure Izzy stays afloat, doesn’t drift and doesn’t drown. As a six-year-old I brought her to Naomi. Her chakras would be cleared only to be clogged almost instantly. Naomi laughed when I enquired about a chakra stent, anything for the child that could help her. Or perhaps a shield for me that could protect me just from her.

  ‘Alice!’ Naomi had laughed as if I was joking, but I’m not sure if I was joking.

  I’m the one who understands her the most, and I realise the importance of the work that I do on her, that I make her do on herself but, as much as I love her, not even a mother can take it all the time. I lie in the bath with my eyes closed, feeling only slightly guilty as she and Andy talk downstairs. I don’t hear their words but feel the low gravelly vibrato of his deep voice drifting up through the floorboards. It’s soothing to hear father and daughter talking, it perhaps should occur more often, but they have always done an elegant dance around one another. Despite his gift with his students, he has sometimes lacked patience with his own daughter.

  The front door closes and Andy comes upstairs.

  ‘You owe me,’ he says, sighing heavily with exaggeration, and we share a laugh.

  ‘I’ll be ready next time,’ I say. ‘Just not today.’

  Our poor daughter. If only she knew.

  I let myself into Lily’s flat. After Ollie died, she moved to a wheelchair-accessible ground-floor flat. Watching her move around I can’t help but think how much easier my life, her life, our lives would have been if she’d done this when I was eighteen. But that was then. Her carer has just been, has cleaned and tidied the flat. Lily is sitting on the couch watching TV, drinking tea and eating chocolate Digestives, looking fresh. New pyjamas and slippers, fluffy hair just washed and dried. It would appear on the surface that everything is fine, but I don’t trust surfaces.

  ‘What now?’ she says as I stand, frozen, in the living room.

  She hates when I visit because I analyse her. I scan all around her to see what’s going on with her. She knows what I’m doing, and it makes her uncomfortable. It’s not so much that I don’t trust what she tells me, though I don’t, but more that none of us can truly know what’s going on in our own bodies anyway. My meddling makes her change meds, make new doctors’ appointments. I uproot her life every time I fly home. She hates it, even though it’s always for her own good.

  Right now I liken her to a skyscraper at night, when they switch the lights off, level by level. Hers began powering off from the ground floor. Now the lights are out from the knees down. The last time I saw her it looked like she was levitating, but now it’s like she’s been amputated.

  I haven’t told her about it because she asked me not to. She said she could never face cancer treatments again, no more surgeries; she’d rather die than go through it all again. But how can I ignore this? She’s closing down. Shutting up. It’s moving up towards her head. Five months since I last saw her. Longer than usual, but time got away with me. From the ankles to the knees in five months; I look at her, trying to calculate time. How do we do that? Find a Dobson unit equivalent for calculating the amount of time we have left? Count the grey hairs, the lines on our faces, the scars on our body, the holes in our energy fields, the pains in our hearts, the aches in our bones, the grudges, the people we have loved, the people we have lost, the people we have culled … I’m so very tired, I could lie down now and—

  ‘For feck’s sake, Alice, what?’

  ‘What happens, Alice?’ Lily asks.

  It’s been a while since she’s spoken and she’s taken me by surprise. She’s sleeping in a hospital bed in our front room that used to be the kids’ den. She’s been living with us for three months. She has a view of a cherry tree covered in blossom; she watches it all day, every day, remarking on its transition. She wondered if she’d live to see it bloom. Now she wonders if she’ll live to see the petals fall, every transition a shared miracle.

  I look up from the television. We’re watching a makeover show, lost in the soft silliness of which couch to put where, as we await the end of her life.

  ‘What do you mean, what happens?’ But I somehow already know what she means, have always known exactly what she means all the time, like a parent who understands the babbles of her toddler. She means what happens at the end of life.

  ‘It comes out the top,’ I say.

  ‘What does?’

  ‘The colour. The light. When a person dies, it all comes out through the head. I’ve seen it. It’s a white, bright brilliant white. Like all the colours that make us up have mixed together. No matter what your mood, it all makes white in the end.’

  No deviant blacks, sludgy greens and browns, the suspicious mustard, the vanity of oranges, the self-pitying blues. No matter about all of that, it’s white. Maybe that’s because we’re all inherently good.

  ‘Gold in the womb, pink in the pram, then we leave white.’

  ‘So we’re the light?’

  All of my nonsense, she had no time for it. She thought there was something wrong with me. That Andy had married somebody with something wrong and there must be something wrong with him, she couldn’t understand it. But over the years she has sat with us while we’ve talked about my aura-seeing. The kids have spoken about it as if it’s normal. What colour is he, Mum? What’s up with her, Mum? I’m guessing she’s jealous, Mum, what do you think? He looks happy but is he, Mum? Is he lying, Mum? So normal and everyday, nobody else that loved me thought it was weird. She started to see it differently. Not that she ever said, but now, now she needs peace, she needs it to make sense.

  ‘Yes, you leave the body through the head, you’re the light, and then you’re free.’

  ‘Where does the light go?’

  ‘Anywhere you want.’

  This part I don’t know for certain, but I’m hoping there’s will involved. I feel that there is for those who are gone but not gone.

  She’s quiet for a moment. ‘Who did you see die?’

  I’ve seen a few things die; rats on the side of the road, roadkill, a pigeon attacked by a magpie, more than a few dogs, flowers, plants, trees. I was too late to get to my dad’s bedside. But there’s only one death worth sharing now.

  ‘Ollie.’

  ‘You weren’t there. He died in prison.’

  ‘When we were younger. He made some stupid jump, fell down a gully. I saw him leave his body. He said so himself.’

  ‘He never told me that.’

  I shrug, not about to argue over it.

  ‘So he had his second chance,’ she says at last, having thought it over. ‘I didn’t do everything right,’ she says, looking back out at the white apple blossom. ‘But I did my best.’

  The lump in my throat only allows me to nod.

  The fragility of final moments.

  But God, the weight of it.

  The caretaker, the caregiver. For a moment, at least, care sharers.

  On a windy night in late spring, the cherry blossom petals are taken out almost all at once.

  Lily leaves on the same night, the wind whisking her colours away.

  I visit her gravestone on her one-month anniversary. The graveyard floor has a low emerald green fog hovering above. It kicks up in a gentle wisp as I move through it, unafraid; it’s peaceful, settled, not hurting anyone.

  I place an aloe vera plant down by her headstone.

  Andy’s latest episode at work has upset him. Left him shaken. All the time and respect he has given his students over the years, he has been nothing but dedicated, but there is no bringing him back from this. He was shoved up against a wall by a student, a hand to his throat, and feels that even though it was just one student and there have been altercations and scuffles before, the trust is broken. The spell that the dream job had cast over him has been broken. I know what that’s like, I tell him, remembering Ollie.