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can’t think of anything to say. Should I literally do what the question asks, stick two fingers down my throat and vomit up the strange, dark monster that has made its home inside of me? We could interrogate this creature instead.
    Amanda keeps at it. “And what do you think is making you feel, like you say, ‘pissed off’?”
    You, I want to say, and Paul and Chick and Mrs Lacey and everyone else who can’t get over the fact my mum is dead and it’s no big deal. I don’t say this. I raise my eyebrows.
    “Sorry that was a . . . I mean, obviously we know what’s making you ‘pissed off’. Obviously we both know that.” Amanda drops behind her fringe to think up some new questions. “I mean, I just want you to explain a bit more about why it’s that particular feeling for you. Let’s look at where these feelings are coming from within you. How are they making you behave?”
    I go back to watching the school football.
    When I was thirteen, our whole class had individual one-off sessions with a community school nurse in the medical room at the back of the sports centre. Everyone lined up alongside the breeze-block building and waited their turn for what our teachers were calling a ‘Year Nine Health Check’. We’d all expected some routine head-lice examination, but Chinese whispers came down the queue as each person came out. We were going to have to talk about our problems – even the boys, and boys, as everyone knows, don’t have problems, apart from the fact they’re boys, of course. The school nurse had decided she was going to weed out the drinkers, the druggies, the vomiters and the starvers, the arm-slicers and the promiscuous slappers. Each of us girls was questioned to cringing point on all areas of ‘female troubles’. Elaine Wilkie was not chuffed to be told she could get thrush if she kept on wearing those thick tights of hers every day.
    But that session was different to this. The school nurse hadn’t been very good at prodding. She’d tried to get me to talk about something private, I’d squirmed and she’d backed off. I felt embarrassed that I didn’t have anything sleazy to keep hidden. Not like Kayleigh Barnes. She’d been trading blowjobs for weed with her brother’s mates since Year Seven.
    In comparison to the school nurse, Amanda’s heavy-duty compassion is like drowning in jam.
    “That’s it really,” I say. “I just feel pissed off.”
    “Can you explain exactly how that feels for you?”
    “I just feel pissed off.”
    “Why is it
that
particular feeling that is coming up for you?”
    “Don’t know. Just is.”
    “Okay, well let’s, um, let’s break it down, Melon.”
    Why do adults always use your name when it isn’t necessary? There is no one else in the room. Of course she is talking to me. They do it all the time, adults, name-check each other. They do it to prove they haven’t gone senile yet, to show that they still have enough of their brain left to remind someone what they’re called. It’s pathetic. It just sounds patronising.
    “I’m not really upset enough for you, am I?”
    Amanda looks taken aback and I’m just about to notch up a point for myself when I notice the spark in her eye. I’ve been tricked into saying something she wants to hear, I can sense it.
    “I mean,” I jump in, “I mean, I feel, I feel . . . But I’m just . . . I think people think that . . .”
    Amanda’s frantic nodding returns, as if what I’m saying makes absolute grammatical sense.
    “I mean,” I raise my voice, try to stop Amanda’s neck from working loose. “
You
think I should be more upset?”
    “How do
you
think you should be behaving?” Amanda shoots back, triumphant.
    Ten points to the counsellor.
    Exasperation is fizzing on my tongue. Amanda reminds me of Mum, that self-satisfied face. I feel like I’m listening to
her
again, talking about the troubled kids at her job, boasting about her work as if it’s curing cancer or