I was born seven weeks premature. An incubator baby. Tubes stuffed up my nose, eyes screwed shut, looked like a tiny wrinkly vole.
I wasn’t meant to survive.
When the nurse put me into Dad’s arms for the first time, he said: She’s light as a feather. That’s how I got my name.
Kids at school think it’s funny, the boys especially.
Featherweight champ, they say.
Quack quack, they chant, waddling with their feet turned out.
Tweet tweet, they chirp, flapping their arms.
I was so small that doctors came up from London and peered at me through the incubator walls and journalists sneaked onto the ward to ask questions and take photos.
I wonder whether that was what made Mum hospitalphobic – the scare she got from me being so small. And then I think about her other phobias too and where they came from, like her leaving-the-house phobia and her swimming phobia and her running-out-of-food phobia.
You were the tiniest baby Willingdon had ever seen, Dad’s told me more times than I can remember, like I’d won a prize. Anyway, it’s all turned out to be what Miss Pierce, my History teacher, calls ironic, because people say the same thing of Mum now – except the opposite: that she’s The Biggest Woman Willingdon Has Ever Seen. People sometimes ask me if I’m adopted. I know what they’re thinking: how can someone so small belong to someone who takes up as much space as Mum?
People are still really interested in Mum and her weight and the fact that she hasn’t come out of the house in years. Last summer, I found Allen, a reporter from the Newton News, hiding behind our hedge with his camera angled at Mum’s bedroom window. He said he’d give me twenty quid if I let him take a photo. I told him to get lost, obviously.
Anyway, Mum’s been chubby ever since I’ve known her, it’s just the way she is. What’s more important for you to know is that she’s the best mum in the world. A mum who’s funny and clever and always has time to listen and doesn’t obsess about stuff like homework and being tidy – or eating vegetables. And although she’s a little on the large side, she’s beautiful, like proper, old-fashioned movie-star beautiful: long, thick, wavy hair, a wide, dimply smile and big soulful eyes that change colour in different lights – sometimes they’re blue and sometimes they’re green and sometimes they’re a brown so light it’s like they’re filled with flecks of gold.
Whenever I think about Mum and how awesome she is and how close we are, I realise that there can’t be many daughters out there as lucky as me.
So Mum being overweight has never mattered to me. As far as I’m concerned, there are a million worse things a mum can be.
That is, it never mattered until last night, New Year’s Eve, when everything went wrong. Really, horribly wrong.
‘You sure you don’t want to come out?’ Jake asks. ‘Rock the town together?’
Jake’s the only guy I know who can be cool and geeky at the same time. We’ve been best friends since we were a week old. My mum and Jake’s mum were pregnant with us at the same time and they went to this baby group, so we were destined to be together. Mum and Steph are really close too. Or they were until this Christmas when they had a blazing row. Now, Mum doesn’t want Steph coming round any more.
‘Rock the town in Willingdon?’ I ask.
Willingdon is the smallest village in England. Population 351 – blink and you’ll miss it. Jake and I are the only kids here.
Jake laughs. ‘Well, rock the village then.’
It’s 11.30pm, New Year’s Eve, and we’re lying on Jake’s bedroom floor, staring at the glow stars on his ceiling and listening to one of his Macklemore albums. Before his parents got divorced, Jake used to listen to hip-hop with his dad. He doesn’t really see his dad now so I guess listening to those albums is a way for Jake to feel like they’re still close.
‘I’ve got to get back to Mum.’ I get up and brush bits of popcorn off my jeans. Popcorn was the only thing that kept me going through Jake’s zombie invasion film.
Jake rolls over. ‘So you’re letting me go out all on my own?’
‘Why don’t you call Amy?’ I ask.
He shakes his head. Amy’s meant to be Jake’s girlfriend but he seems to spend more time avoiding her than actually going out with her.
At New Year, most people prefer to be in crowds: everyone pressing in, counting down, filling up their champagne flutes, music blaring. I like it quiet, just me and the person I love most in the whole world: Mum. I love Dad too, but he’s so busy zooming around on emergency plumbing jobs that he doesn’t have time to talk. Even on New Year’s, he’s out repairing people’s blocked loos and leaky drains and frozen pipes. So Mum and I see the New Year in together. In those last few seconds before the clock ticks over, we hold our hands and our breaths and send wishes out to the New Year.
I love it. The magic of it. The stillness. The feeling that anything could happen.
‘I’ll call you,’ I say to Jake.
‘At 12:01,’ he throws back.
That’s a tradition too, my 12:01 post-New Years Eve phone call to Jake.
‘12:01. I promise.’ I lean over and kiss his cheek – a bit too close to his mouth, which makes us both jolt back and stare in opposite directions. ‘You can tell me all about your resolutions,’ I say quickly.
Jake raises his eyebrows. ‘I’m not perfect already?’
‘Perfect’s overrated.’
He smiles.
The thing is, beside his bad taste in films, Jake’s as close to perfect as it gets. Next to Mum and Dad, he’s the best thing in my life.
There are loads of people out on Willingdon Green, standing on their front lawns with plastic champagne flutes looking at the sky. Behind the fireworks, droopy Christmas decorations hang from people’s houses and the shops on the parade, which makes the village look tired.
When I get to our cottage, which sits bang opposite St Mary’s Church, it’s the same as always. Dad’s Emergency Plumbing Van is missing from the drive and a blue light flickers through the lounge windows. It’s been Mum’s room ever since she got too large to manage the stairs. And to share a bed with Dad.
We’ve had to build ramps everywhere and to make all the doors bigger so that she can fit through them. Including the front door. Which is all a bit pointless because Mum hasn’t left the house in thirteen years.
So, the lounge is basically Mum’s world.
I’ve thought about ways to get her out of the house or to help her with a diet, but whenever I suggest going for a walk, she finds an excuse not to move from her armchair, which has the telly dead in front of it and the window that looks out to The Green to the right of it, so she can alternate between looking at a made-up world and a real world she’s left behind.
I