Sometimes I forget that Mariame ain't my mother. As she massages the taut muscles in my shoulder, her strong hands occasionally digging so deep into the knots that I jerk away with a hiss only to be pulled back, it is to be understood that she considers me family.

I can't fathom how neither she nor Ridha questioned our relationship — wouldn't they want someone better for their only son? Someone a little cleverer or more ambitious. Or at the very least, someone who could love him in public without care for what other people think. But if they have doubts, they've never allowed them to be visible. They welcomed me with open arms from the beginning.

The first time we were alone together, Mariame assured me, out of nowhere, that she and Ridha had no issue with me being Asian. Her parents practically stopped talking to her because she married a North African Muslim and she wanted me to know that I never had to worry about that. It had never crossed my mind as a worry and yet, the reassurance lifted a weight off my shoulders. When we decided to move in together, she taught me her Beninese jollof recipe so I could make it for Ziri when he got depressed. She were well clear that she wouldn't teach it to me "just so I could cook it for my next boyfriend" and I swore that there would not be a next boyfriend. Mariame hummed and said, I know this already or you wouldn't be here. I know you want to marry my son. She turned back to the ingredients piled on the table only to realise I were crying.

She hugged me, assuring that she were just joking about hunting me down if I gave the recipe to someone else. I shook my head and croaked into her shoulder, I want to marry your son. I hated that I were crying in front of my boyfriend's mother — especially since I didn't exactly know why I were crying — but Mariame only sang some lullaby in French until I stopped.

Despite how much Ziri complains about her being strict and unreasonable, Mariame is mostly gentle.

Except now as her thumbs gouge into the tight muscle under my shoulder blades. She demanded I let her apply some coolant to the pulled muscle in my arm when she noticed me wince regularly during dinner. Now, as I sit on the floor between her legs, Mariame on the sofa, she has clearly decided to work her way through my whole back, humming disapprovingly whenever a knot is particularly stoddy.

Ziri carries dessert bowls from the kitchen. As he turns away to collect the tea, Ridha, still seated at the table, takes one but Ziri spins around in a flash slaps his hand away. 'No, Baba, this one is for Miles.'

Ridha laughs incredulously. 'They're all the same.'

'No, they aren't, because this is my favourite spoon.' Ziri pushes another sellou bowl to his dad. 'You can have one with an Ikea spoon.'

'Astaghfirullah!'

'Désolé.' He bows his head in apology. 'C'est ça l'amour.'

My cheeks ache with my smile as I watch them. When we first started dating, I were nervous coming around here since they seem to argue about everything but it didn't take long for me to realise there's never any vitriol in their bickering. Even their arguments are an expression of love. When I understood that, I became so bitter I refused to come over for weeks. Seeing the casual affection they share made me want to scream or cry, burn their house down, burn my house down. Ziri's parents hug him every time he comes home and when he leaves, it's with food and fruit. I doubt Ziri has ever felt unloved, even when he feels unloveable.

And his parents are so obviously in love too. Sometimes they share glances when Ziri ain't looking, pass inside jokes like teenagers pass notes in class, fully aware that they've raised a ridiculous and slightly naive son. When Ridha cooks, he takes off his wedding ring and places it on a decorative platter beside the pot of parsley that's been placed there for that sole purpose. Mariame is tall enough to kiss the top of his balding head whenever she likes. And how's that fair? Why did I get parents who only yelled at each other and then one went off and died?

At the thought, I dig my nail into the scab on my thumb. The dip that naturally borders fingernails is much deeper than it should be, a perfect slot for me to dig around for nerves without anyone noticing. If people ever ask me about the injury, I shrug and say hangnail and no one has ever questioned it even if the rough skin extends nearly to my knuckle.

Ziri complains about his parents almost as much as he talks about missing them, but I don't think he'll ever understand just how lucky he is. This house feels exactly as I imagine a family home does.

Somehow Ziri becomes more himself when he visits Sufsdale; it fills him with more love than he should be able to physically contain. I didn't think it were possible to love a place as much as Ziri loves this town, especially this town. If Sufsdale had a slogan it would be "Sufsdale — it sure does exist". You can't even buy postcards because there's nowt here to photograph. And yet, Ziri loves it with every bone in his body. When we're in Brighton, he sometimes announces wistfully, I miss Sufsdale, like it's an old friend he hasn't seen in a while.

Mariame's hands retreat from my back with a hum that means she's done. 'Now you better not go liftin all sort of things tomorrow. This muscle needs to rest or it will become a serious injury.'

I nod though I've got work on Sunday and, realistically, will be lifting all sorts of things. Eloise promoted me for a reason; now is not the time for me to stop, figuratively and literally, carrying my weight. I pull my t-shirt back on and it sticks to the pain relief ointment on my skin.

As I sit down beside Ziri at the table, his hand falls instinctively to my thigh. Leaning his head on my shoulder in some version of a hug, he offers a smile.

He hasn't brought up therapy or Dominic since my — what I can no longer deny as a — panic attack at the park yesterday and I have the feeling he won't bring it up until we get back home on Sunday, as if we're on holiday in Sufsdale and he don't want to ruin it. The lid on the can of worms has been stabbed open, the breather holes too large, and the maggots are crawling out but I'm not ready to open it yet. And he don't seem to have any intention of forcing me.

If only I could stay here, in this moment in this home with Ziri's head on my shoulder and the sellou topped with cinnamon oranges in front of me, and never have to move into the future...

            My legs are heavy as I trudge myself up the driveway to Má's house. Though the distance from Ziri's door to our door, having to go around the chain-link fence, is merely twenty-two steps (thirty if I take small ones), the journey seems to last forever. Maybe it will, if I drag my feet enough...

Yelling greets me the moment I open the door. The flutters Ziri set free in my chest die with the slap of a flyswatter. Iris and Má shout on top of each other, their voices filling up the sterile house with ease until Iris screams and storms out of the kitchen. Passing me she snaps, 'I hate her,' and stomps up the stairs. Her bedroom door slams and the house is surrendered into silence for five seconds before Being As An Ocean blasts from her room.

I stare at the entrance rug. Welcome, it says in the same kind of font you'd find in those Believe or Life, Love, Laugh signs. It probably is the same font. I remember when we bought the mat during one of our annual TK Maxx visits when Má had pages' worth of shopping list and we spent hours in the store until we both had a headache from the perfume and the lights. Má wanted a plain doormat because she's thought plain things look better since she chose to become a minimalist to pretend it's an aesthetic choice and not because she's a poor recovering hoarder, but they only had ones with the bold white Welcome printed on.

She frowned at it when she set it down in our house in Leeds as if such an explicit statement of welcome were summat she couldn't promise to anyone who stepped over the threshold to read it.

Leaving my overnight bag by the stairs, I approach the kitchen. Má leans over the worktop with her palms pressed to the acrylic and head bent low, breathing heavily.

'What's happening?'

She throws her hands up in surrender. 'I dunno. I don't know.' Her voice breaks though I'm not sure if it's with sadness or anger. She scrubs away the tears that stubbornly drop from her eyes. 'I'm just an awful mother who always does everything wrong... She's so difficult.'

Her arms fall with a slap against her thighs and I wince. The doors of the house inside me refuse to stay shut.

Fidgeting with my septum ring in my pocket, I edge from the doorway and hug her. 'You're a good mum.'

Má wraps her arms around me and starts to sob into my chest. I wish I knew how to hug the way Ziri does but I only know how to hug as a son who looks like his dead father. Má only knows how to hug as a hoarder hugs the last of her clutter.

'You're so good for me, Thỏ.'

The muscles of my back cinch into tighter knots than the ones before Mariame's massage. My stomach squirms and I try to not chuck up the sellou I just ate. A worm wriggles out of the can — You're so good for me, bunny.

Má is too busy crying through my hoodie to notice. 'You're the only one who's ever on my side.'

'I'm always on your side, Má.' I've said it so many times that I don't even think before it's past my teeth.

I were on her side when she and Ba would fight. When he told her that she were exhausting with the way she refused to chuck owt away, with the way our kitchen overflowed with toast bags and takeaway boxes and the metal wires that came around chargers and cords, how we couldn't eat a biscuit without having to battle through a barricade of empty mason jars she swore she'd find a way to reuse, how they could never hoover under the bed because she had mountains of junk under it. I were on her side when he called her crazy. I were on her side when she threw glasses at him, then cried over the shards when he binned them.

I were on her side when Bà Nội yelled that she had to get out of bed, that her husband might be dead but she still had two kids — one of whom were a toddler — who needed to be fed, who needed their mother to have a job so she could feed them. I were on her side when everybody warned her not to move here, that leaving her family weren't the right choice, that there were nowt for any of us in some pinprick of a town in East Sussex.

I were on her side when I told her I'm gay. I had no right to burden her with that information. I were tarnishing Ba's memory but more importantly, I were tarnishing her because what kind of mother creates a baby in her womb only for him to forsake the entire organ?

I imagine telling her about counselling. She would laugh, what have I got to go to therapy about? I already saw the school counsellor for a month after Ba died, surely that were enough. Or maybe she'd be horrified that I've betrayed her, that I'm conspiring against her, telling someone awful things about her.

She pulls away and caresses my cheeks as if I'm the one crying, as if drying my cheeks will dry hers too because I'm such a dutiful mirror.

'You want to eat?'

I lick my lips and swallow. 'Already ate, didn't I?'

'Right.' What I hear is you think I'm a bad mother.

I have to do summat to make it right, to prevent her from blowing up, to remind her that I'm on her side even if I sometimes let my boyfriend's parents feed me. 'I'll talk to her if you want. Iris.'

Má's teary eyes glisten. Instant regret is washed away by relief. 'You'd do that for me?'

'Sure.'

            Even through the door, the drums in Iris's music beat against my skull, vibrating through my feet in the same way static would if you pressed your finger against an old telly. I knock several times and when there's still no response, call out, 'Em ba? Can I come in?'

Iris lets me inside. She turns the music down though keeps it loud enough that, if Má were behind the door trying to eavesdrop, she'd have a hard time doing it. Her eyes are still narrowed when she slumps onto her bed where her duvet is clumped to reveal she were lying under it before I came. Her phone lies discarded by the pillow.

I sit on her desk chair and pick up a bottle of pink cracked nail polish she has left out, along with what might be half of her possessions. I rotate it in my fingers as if the small print on the label is fascinating before I bite the bullet.

'What's happened then?'

'It's fucking hell living here alone is what's happened,' Iris snaps. 'All she ever fucking does is complain. I leave my shoes a little skewed; complaint. I don't hoover correctly even though she's never shown me how she wants me to do it; complaint. I get a B on one assignment that was completely useless and will do nothing for my grade; complaint. I buy regular oranges instead of blood oranges and now the whole fucking meal is ruined apparently; complaint. I have a friend over; complaint. I go to a friend's house; complaint. I can't even breathe right! I'm about to go fucking mental.'

A tap opens in the house of my mind and water starts to drip on the floor but every time I turn it off, another one opens. I stayed home for two years after school when I decided to take "a gap year before uni" which turned into five gap years — and counting. When Ziri suggested we move in together, it only made sense for me to go to Brighton, but sometimes I feel like I should've stayed. At least, until Iris finished school. Maybe I were selfish. They need me here. It wouldn't be so bad if I were here.

Unable to look at her, I open the nail varnish and paint my thumb with it. 'I'm sorry. And she's well sorry.'

Iris arches an eyebrow.

'Look, I know she can be difficult and that, but she—'

Iris cuts me off with a groan. 'You defend her like it's a fucking Olympic sport,' she snaps. 'She's trying her best, she's tired, she's had a rough couple of years. I'm trying my best too. I'm tired too. We've all had a rough couple of years. When do the rest of us get to be tired? You're a fucking doormat, you know.'

I open my mouth only to shut it. She might as well've slapped me. I watch the pink varnish on my thumbnail crack as it dries.

Iris raves on. 'How long is she gonna be tired for? Dad died over fourteen years ago. How long is she gonna use it as an excuse?' Her eyes pierce into me and I look up to meet them because I know she won't be satisfied if she don't get to glare at me. 'How long are you?'

I stack the textbooks and notebooks thrown onto her desk as I try to script what to say. Iris were much easier when she were eight and I could just hand her a pretty rock to distract her out of any mood, when I didn't have to pick a side.

'Em ba–'

'You have no idea what it's like to be here alone with her.' But even as she spits it out, she turns away to hide her tears.

I get up and sit next to her on the bed, invite her into a hug and though she resists, it don't take long until she's crying into my hoodie which is still damp from Má's tears.

'I know she gives you a hard time about school but... it's fine if you don't do well all the time. Your GCSEs aren't gonna determine the rest of your life.' I say this though I'm not entirely sure it's true. I mean, look where my GCSEs got me.

Má has slapped me seven times in my life. One of them were when she found the letter with my GCSE results. I had tried to hide it from her. It weren't a difficult task, not with my mother who failed to remember parents' evening three years in a row until I got detention because the teachers thought that I were giving her the wrong dates. But she did find the envelope.

I came home from Jacob's to find her on the stairs, clutching it in her fist.

Why have you failed all your classes?

Most of them are C's, aren't they? I argued as if that made a difference. A C is as good as an expulsion.

Why is PE the only thing you have an A in? That's not a real subject.

She said that I weren't gonna take PE as an A-level like I had planned and that if I didn't start doing better in school, I wouldn't be allowed football either. I told her it were literally the only thing I'm good at but Má had made up her mind. So I were even more miserable in school than before. Then she decided to move here right before my last year which definitely did no service for my grades.

I'm not letting her slap Iris, even if she does fail every subject, even if it's just once.

Being As An Ocean buries the sound of Iris's crying and I rub her back. 'I'll talk to her. It'll be okay.'