Clare was dying. Slowly, there was plenty of time yet but still it was the inescapable conclusion. She could feel it, a lifting at the edges of her mind, something indefinable leaving with the moisture from her skin. When, she wondered, did your skin begin to change? Such an insidious process, creeping up when you least expected it. Years ago she wallowed in the bath for hours, with bubbles and a book in hand, forgetting the world completely for a while. When she emerged it was be in someone else's skin, wrinkled and fragile, needing to be pampered back into youthfulness. Now the bath has no effect, her skin has become submarine in its own right, like a creature left too long in the dark.

She remembers the day her own mother died. A summer day full of damp, dead heat. They had been fractious all day, as children are in the heat, sticky and grumpy, yearning for cold ice-cream and a swimming pool. Instead, they had put on their Sunday best and yawned through a church service that seemed to last forever. A family lunch followed. They bickered through that, the older children vicious, the younger children fragile. Then it was home for tea on the patio and more adult gossip.

Eventually, tired of their squabbling and whinging her mother had given her, the eldest, a little money and sent the whole tribe down the road, chasing after the ice cream van. They ran, helter-skelter, colliding with each other as she chose and paid. Then they wandered back home, quiet now, kicking at stones and dust in the road, absorbed in sweet coolness running down chins and fingers.

The ambulance had arrived by the time they got back. She remembers her mother lying sprawled on the patio, a grotesque, beached whale, thighs lolling, legs open, revealing rolls of fat and hair sprouting where she did not know hair should grow. She asked the ambulance man about that but he just smiled at her, patted her head and closed her mother's legs before covering her.

She heard snatches of conversation, 'Nothing we could do.' said the ambulance man to her father, 'We suspect a heart attack.' Condolences from family and friends, confusion from other children, tears from her father. She did not know why he was crying. She had seen him with her aunt earlier that week, rolling around on his bed (her mother had slept elsewhere for as long as she could remember) so she supposed he would not miss her mother much. She kept sneaking peeks at her aunt, wondering why she did not comfort her father. But her aunt was crying too, red-faced and did not approach her father, did not even catch his eye.

She was allowed to take a week off school afterwards and they went shopping to buy black dresses for her and her sister and black ties for her brothers. For mourning they said. She did not understand that. Why should black be the only colour to be sad in? To her mind grey would have been the saddest colour, a mixture of nothings. She asked her father if she could buy a grey dress instead but he went red in the face, shouted at her and shook her by the shoulders. She supposed that a grey dress must be a bad thing indeed, even suggesting she write a label, so that people knew she was in mourning, did not improve matters. So she let it be.

They were still wearing black dresses when Maureen moved in. Maureen was not at all like their mother. She had darker skin. She had slimmer legs. And she had a bigger ass. That's what their father said anyway but when she told her teacher she was told to be quiet and stop being silly. She did not see what was so silly about having a big ass. In fact she was not sure at that time what an ass was but the way her father said it, it had to be a good thing.

Maureen was kind to the children. Her father said Maureen had come to help out around the house, to do some cleaning and cooking and iron his shirts. He said they weren't to bother her, that she was going to be very busy helping him. Clare wanted to ask him why Maureen slept over and why she sometimes crept down the hall into his room late at night but she didn't dare. She supposed that he had trouble sleeping, missing her mother, and that Maureen was helping him with that as well.

Maureen read the children stories in the afternoon, when she had finished her chores. Sometimes she played games with them and she always let them help her in the kitchen. Clare learnt to cook by watching Maureen and helping from time to time, stirring when she was told to stir, adding what she was told to add, making sure each time that she measured everything exactly. She made their evening meal one day and her father was so proud he hugged her. He had never done that before, and he never did again, but she remembered.

She was sixteen when her father died. Old enough to understand Maureen's terrible grief. And her anger. Clare had just discovered boys. Or, to be more accurate, boys had just discovered Clare. One of them had taken her to the cinema. He tried to feel her up on the back row but she wasn't really interested. She liked being taken out though so she hinted that he might get lucky another time. So they went out again, got drunk and danced and danced. She left him puking in the club at two and caught a taxi home.

She tripped over the cat on the way in and fell on the stairs and that's where her father found her, sprawled half-conscious and smelling of whisky and cigarettes. She had never seen him turn purple before. Maureen stood at the top of the stairs and watched him rant himself hoarse. When the world stopped spinning Clare crawled upstairs to bed, not caring what colour her father was. Clinging onto the bed she heard him shouting at Maureen and a series of thuds, then silence.

The next morning Maureen woke up next to a corpse, with bruises darkening her face. She blamed Clare, dragged her out of bed, shoving her face at the dead man, frantic with grief. Clare left that day. She still slept in that house, where else did she have to go? But she never spoke another word inside its walls.

She began to drink for a while, carrying around a hip flask, and the world seemed better.

She got married when she was eighteen. To a boy named John. She did not love him. He did not love her. But she was carrying his baby.

Two years later she left him and left her baby.

Clare doesn't want to remember that time. They say that, when you die, the whole of your life flashes before your eyes. She does not want that, when the time comes she wants only edited highlights. She thinks that maybe if she practices, rehearses over and over in her head the things she wishes to remember, maybe she can block out the rest and not need to revisit the past.

She had always dreamed of marrying a rich man. In those dreams the glass slipper fitted onto her dainty foot and she was transported into a world of leisure and luxury. In the real world, glass slippers do not come big enough for her size 9 feet. She found her rich man, more than she deserved Maureen would have said. But Maureen had vanished from her life long ago. Nobody told her that Prince Charming came with a price tag. Nobody told her that, having bought her, he would feel entitled to buy others as well. For a while she played the dutiful wife, shopped and spent his money, trotted out on his arm when required, entertained his girlfriends when he desired. Then she divorced him. Used his money for lawyers and fleeced him. No more men for Clare.

The divorce settlement more than paid for a round-the-world ticket. A blur of countries, people, restaurants; a steady flow of cash streamed from her. It was not until she got to India that she stopped. Laid low by the heat and tainted water she stopped. A fortnight went by in a haze of humid illness, leaving her weak as a newborn. She recovered quickly enough. Whilst not young anymore she was still strong. But still she stayed in India. Drawn onto the streets of the cities and into the mountains, she stayed.

One evening she sat alone in the hotel garden, eyes half closed against the heat, cat-napping in solitude. Slipping out of sleep she heard bells and opened her eyes to find a woman sat opposite her. Clothed from head to toe in ochre robes covered in tiny bells and ribbons the woman was simply staring at her. Clare stared back, taking in deeply creased skin, black wiry hair beginning to thin and brown eyes. They sat in silence, neither willing to speak first or break eye contact.

As the sun set the woman nodded at Clare and stood, slowly. Reaching into her sleeve she drew out an object and placed it on the table. Looking Clare up and down one last time she said, 'Look after it.' and she turned and walked away. Clare picked the box up. It was about the size of a fist and heavy. Covered in black velvet, peeling away at one corner to reveal turquoise underlay. She turned it around and around but could see no way of opening it so she packed it away and forgot about it. Not long after that she left India to travel to Europe.