Mother's Day

by Abigail Burdess

Genres: Literary Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Motherhood can be murder...
Perfect for fans of MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER, MAGPIE and HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY.

'Terrific, so twisted'
HARRIET TYCE

'One hell of a ride!'
THE SUN

'Superbly written and darkly funny. I simply couldn't look away.'
JANICE HALLETT

'An absolute corker'
GLAMOUR

Anna never had a real family. She never needed one.

But when she meets her birth mother, Marlene, everything changes - because the same day, she learns she's going to have a baby of her own.

Now Anna's hurled headfirst into a new family, whether she wants it or not. At last, Marlene has a chance to become the mother she never was. She's so close, she can practically taste it.

And nothing - or more accurately, no one - will stand in her way.

'Dark, funny'
GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE MONTH

'A startlingly original, pitch dark page-turner'
CLAIRE MCGOWAN

'Dark, brilliant, and completely and utterly compelling.'
JENNY COLGAN

'Deliciously dark.'
JOHN MARRS

'Marlene is a jaw-dropping creation, the mother of malign mothers'
BETH MORREY

'A stunning ending that leaves you breathless. Astonishingly good.'
ROBERT THOROGOOD

'Twists and turns until you really can't imagine what might happen next'
KATY BRAND

'Completely gripping and quite terrifying. I was utterly blindsided by its twists and turns.'
LUCY PORTER

'Fantastic: so funny, so human - you won't be able to put it down.'
ISY SUTTIE

Release date: March 2, 2023

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 416

Sample

Praise for Mother’s Day:

‘Mother's Day is terrific. So dark, so twisted and one of the most batsh*t crazy characters you'll ever meet in Marlene.’ - Harriet Tyce, bestselling author of Blood Orange

‘Superbly written and darkly funny, Mother's Day is an epic psychological thriller that revels in the visceral horror of family relationships. So brilliantly and horrifyingly executed I simply couldn't look away. Abigail Burdess is a refreshing and original writer - don't take your eyes off her.’ - Janice Hallett, author of The Appeal and The Twyford Code

‘Mother's Day is so dark and so shockingly, fabulously funny. I absolutely adored it.’ - Daisy Buchanan, bestselling author of Insatiable

‘Dark, brilliant, and completely and utterly compelling.’ - Jenny Colgan, author of Little Beach Street Bakery

‘Fast and funny, dark and beautiful - I loved every page.’ - Robert Webb, author of How Not To Be a Boy

‘A startlingly original, pitch dark page-turner’ - Claire McGowan, bestselling author of What You Did and The Other Wife

‘Deliciously dark, dripping in malice and drenched with razor sharp wit. Burdess is a writer to be watched - and feared.’ - John Marrs, bestselling author of What Lies Between Us and The Minders

‘A twisted, gruesome and diabolically funny exploration of motherhood that I lapped up like a feral cat. Dark, weird and brilliant, Mother's Day will haunt you - particularly Marlene, a jaw-dropping creation, the mother of malign mothers.’ - Beth Morrey, bestselling author of Saving Missy

‘A brilliant debut with all the twists and turns of Du Maurier and a stunning ending that leaves you breathless. Astonishingly good.’ - Robert Thorogood, bestselling author of The Marlow Murder Club

‘A fresh and complex story about the many layers of motherhood that twists and turns until you really can't imagine what might happen next. Startling and instantly intriguing.’ - Katy Brand, comedian and author of Practically Perfect

‘Mother's Day is completely gripping and quite terrifying, an addictive story about motherhood and madness. I was utterly blindsided by its twists and turns.’ - Lucy Porter

‘Wickedly dark and devilishly funny, I loved this original take on the 'mother daughter' relationship. A must read for 2023!’ - Sophie Flynn, author of Keep Them Close

‘Had me absolutely gripped from the beginning. A dark and claustrophobic tale.’ - Ingrid Oliver, actor and comedian

‘Pregnancy happens when sperm enters a vagina, travels through the cervix and womb to the fallopian tube and fertilises an egg. Conception occurs up to five days after having sex. Your weeks of pregnancy are dated from the first day of your last period.’



Anna was in the dark. ‘Dermot?’ His shoulder was in her mouth. ‘Dermot!’ Anna jiggled her shoulder a bit. He was a dead weight on top of her. Dermot let out what was, unmistakably, a long snore. Anna shouted, ‘DERMOT!’ But it was no good.

Anna fumbled to get her phone from the pocket of the jeans she’d dropped by the side of the bed. She just about reached them. The smashed screen lit up the tiny bedroom. She scrolled down her friends’ ‘Happy Birthday’ messages, while eighteen stone of Dermot pressed on her bladder. Anna counted. Sometime after ninety-one Dermot woke with a snort, muttered something incomprehensible, like ‘Noughts!’ and rolled off her. As he unpeeled, Anna’s freed right hand shot down to keep the condom attached to him, rather than her. That was a first. He’d fallen asleep while she was in the bathroom, or getting water, or going between the sofa and the bed, but never actually during sex itself. Had he even finished? Anna suspected that he faked it quite regularly. Ever since they’d had a fantastic Saturday afternoon demonstrating their come-faces to each other, Anna had been unable to shake the suspicion, at the crucial moment, that Dermot was doing the face on purpose.

‘It’s all right,’ Dermot had woken up enough to know there was some incomplete task, though not necessarily enough to grasp it was to tie a knot in a condom. ‘I’m doing it, I’m doing it!’

Anna rolled out of bed, grabbing Dermot’s huge towelling dressing gown from the hook on the back of the bedroom door. It was one of those hooks without screws or any other fixings, so they can be moved from flat to flat. Anna had bought it three flats ago – two of those had been with Dermot. Once upright, she noticed she couldn’t get the floor to stay still. She headed straight for the toilet. Four minutes of throwing up red wine later, she managed to get into the shower.

The water pooled around her feet. The plug was blocked again, a consequence of being in what her boyfriend described as ‘A Wookie Union’ – Dermot’s chestnut shoulder-length hair and beard, and her Disney Princess plait. It took her ten minutes to twist the barbecue skewer down the drain and get it working. The shower was an impregnable expanse of beige tiles. Why was every rental bathroom designed to be hosed down after a murder?

When she came out of the shower to dress in the tracksuit bottoms and hoodie which were her usual pyjamas, Dermot was still dead to the world. He was flat out on top of the duvet, naked, his conker-bright curls merging with his dappled beard, and his long, knotted left arm flung across the bed in an expansive gesture: a beached Viking. In the neon light from the window the pale down on his skin traced his outline, making him almost luminesce. Anna briefly considered trying to cover him up but knew from bitter experience she couldn’t lift him: he was over a foot taller than her and twice as broad across. They made a classic double act: Laurel and Lardy, Dermot said. Sometimes strangers would start laughing just at the sight of them together. She took the phone out on to the balcony to check her email. It was an iPhone so old they had a running joke that no mugger would want it. There were three emails from a job recruitment site called Charity Career she’d signed up to ages ago just in case. Maternity cover for a fundraising job in a refugee organisation in Glasgow (five years’ experience required). That looked interesting. That was far enough away, but not insane. She was finishing her cigarette when . . .

‘Aha! Caught ya!’

Anna yelped and dropped her phone, adding to the network of cracks across the screen.

‘I thought you’d given up,’ Dermot said.

Dermot, all six foot five of him and both his chins, was ducking under the balcony door.

‘You know you won’t be allowed to smoke when we’re married. I shall forbid it!’ Dermot made a small cross with his two forefingers, sliding his voice from his natural deep Sligo to that of a high-pitched, censorious English bishop.

‘When we’re married?’ Anna wondered if the red wine was going to come up again. She fought to keep the blind panic out of her voice. ‘Are we getting married then?’

‘Well, if you’re asking. Are you asking?’ Dermot perched on the table, which looked way too small to support him: a giant on a toadstool. ‘’Cause I feel like you should at least get down on one knee, or both. Both knees is fine, too. No?’ He raised his eyebrows suggestively. ‘All right then! Give me a minute to think about it, OK?’ Dermot swept his hair off his shoulders. ‘I just can’t be rushed!’

The phone was hot in Anna’s hand: a tiny glowing doorway to somewhere else. Could she say she had five years’ experience? If you added it all up, sure.

‘Look,’ Dermot was still doing his shtick, ‘stop pressuring me, OK? I will marry you when I’m good and ready, and not before! Got it?’

‘You’re right,’ Anna deflected. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to say yes. I’d think less of you if you did. It’s not like I’ve made any sort of effort. I should go down on one knee! I should get a ring! I should maybe wait an hour after we’ve had crappy sex!’

‘It wasn’t that bad.’ Dermot looked sheepish.

‘You fell asleep.’

Dermot caved instantly. ‘OK, it was crappy. So, what you’re saying is . . . it’s not the perfect time, ask again, right?’ He grinned at her. On Dermot’s front tooth was a star-shaped patch of lighter white, like he was a cartoon, constantly twinkling. ‘I mean, you’re going to ask me again?’

A baby screamed, as if burned, from the darkness, and Anna started.

‘Jesus!’ said Dermot, putting his hand on her back. ‘It’s just an owl! What’s got into you?’



Anna perched on the wall on the edge of the balding lawn, balancing her paper plate, piled high with stuffed vine leaves and pistachio pastries. Cherries from the tree overhead spattered the brick. She’d tried to find somewhere out of the path of the children, who were bombing around the tiny back garden. Layla sat next to her, dressed in a white shirt, as she was every workday, although her usual NHS jacket was balled up beside her in concession to the baking sun. It was a black jacket, standard issue of some spun plastic, the kind of fabric that turns meadows into dust bowls, easily wiped, with a little name badge which read, ‘Dr Layla Pasdar’.

‘There are so many of them!’ Anna said, gesturing to the skinny kids who were whipping each other with wet towels.

‘There are three.’ Layla raised her voice to her nephews, ‘Hey! Twats! Knock it off!’ She turned back to Anna. ‘What’s the big favour?’

‘Would it be OK if I put you down as a reference?’ Anna asked.

Layla’s face congealed, ‘No!’

‘What?’ Anna maintained total innocence.

‘Don’t tell me you’re doing this,’ said Layla.

‘Doing what? I’m just applying for a job.’ Anna glanced around the garden.

‘Where? Where are you applying for a job?’ Layla interrogated her.

‘Glasgow.’

‘Great! I thought you’d finished with all this.’

‘All what?’

‘Have you even told him you’re moving to Glasgow?’ Layla threw down the question like a gauntlet.

‘Who?’ Anna asked.

‘Don’t be a dick.’

Anna blinked. Layla was a Londoner but could swear for Scotland: the worse the word the better she liked it; hanging around with her was just swimming in a stream of shits and fucks. Anna assumed it was a hangover from teenage rebellion.

Layla’s father was an Iranian shopkeeper, and her mother was a beautician, probably the most beautiful and, crucially, ladylike woman Anna had ever met. She was currently illuminating the buffet in Layla’s back room. Her nails were a burnished gold, shaped to a point, her black hair was always highlighted and low-lighted various shades of caramel, her eyebrows threaded into two perfect commas, quotation marks around the eternal worried question mark between her eyebrows, etched in her skin despite the Botox. ‘What’s gone wrong now?’ her face seemed to say. ‘Whatever it is, I’m prepared to face it waxed.’ Layla had conformed in many ways, becoming a clinical psychologist: ‘Almost a doctor!’ as her mother would say. ‘I am a bloody doctor,’ Layla would mutter murderously. ‘Look at my fucking jacket!’

Every time Layla cursed like a trucker with Tourette’s, Anna thought of the phrase ‘You kiss your mother with that mouth?’ and pictured Layla’s mother’s endlessly worried face offering her perfect cheek to be kissed. Layla was not groomed, nor was she risk-averse. She climbed rock walls and jumped out of planes. On Saturdays, she punched strangers in some modern sort of martial art with a fancy Japanese name for beating the crap out of people. It was as if she was trying to fulfil her mother’s conviction that something terrible would happen to her the moment she was out of her sight. Layla also had sex with good-looking and much younger men, who presumably she swore at like she swore at Anna, but calling Anna a dick was fairly direct, even for her.

‘No, I haven’t told Dermot. I’m not going to get the job. What’s the point in worrying him?’ Anna said.

‘Bullshit. You’re going to leave him! I bet the poor bastard doesn’t have the faintest clue you’re fucking off!’

Anna lowered her voice, ‘I’m not anything off. I probably won’t even get it.’

‘What about me?’ Layla was indignant. ‘What am I supposed to do with you in Glasgow?’

‘I’ll be back in six months! It’s maternity cover!’

‘Oh! So, you’re getting the job now?’

Anna was bewildered. ‘I mean, not if you won’t give me a reference. I honestly don’t understand why we’re fighting. Dermot’s not going to be upset if I get a job . . .’

‘Fuck! You’re so fucking infuriating.’ Layla’s paper plate upended, tipping kofta on the cracked earth. She stood up. Then sat down again.

‘Did something happen?’

‘Like what?’

Layla narrowed her eyes at Anna. Anna tried hard to keep her face open. But then looked at the grass.

‘He proposed, didn’t he? Fuck a woodchuck chuck! He fucking proposed!’ Layla crowed.

‘No! Yes, but as a joke. It wasn’t real!’ Anna protested.

‘So it was an unreal proposal,’ said Layla.

‘No . . . yes . . . it was . . . don’t make a thing of this!’ Anna said.

‘Did he or did he not ask you to marry him and have his little babies?’

‘Yes!’ said Anna. ‘But I can’t, can I?’

‘You aren’t seriously saying that to me, are you?’ Layla was in her fourth round of IVF. ‘Why can’t you? ’Cause he’s not Jewish?’

Anna almost did a double take. Where did that come from?

‘No, I don’t even know if I’m Jewish! That’s the whole . . .’ Anna struggled to articulate what she had never said aloud to herself and fell back on practicalities. ‘I’m a temp. Dermot doesn’t have a real job.’

Layla snorted, ‘That’s not a real reason.’

‘Okay, what if I have some . . . genetic disorder? Some family history of something awful?’ Anna asked.

‘What if you do? Why does that matter?’ Layla countered. Anna looked at the fold-out table, where Layla’s loving mother was doling out home-made pudding in the sunshine. Layla did not have the first clue what she meant.

‘Why don’t you adopt, then?’ Anna said, surprising herself with the aggression in her voice.

‘What?’

‘If it makes no difference whether your family is biological, why don’t you adopt a baby instead of putting yourself through hell to have one?’

Layla’s response was silence.

‘Exactly! It matters. I don’t know if I’m a . . . I don’t know anything . . . I don’t even know my name!’ Anna said.

‘Yes, you do!’ Layla exploded. ‘It’s Anna. You’re allowed to be happy. You’re allowed to get married. You’re allowed to have kids. Even if your mum can’t be there when you do.’

‘Oh my God, Layla!’ Anna replied. ‘I just came for a reference. If I wanted the full psychoanalysis I’d have, you know, paid your insane fees!’

‘What have you done that’s so bad? Why are you punishing yourself? Why can’t you marry him?’

‘I think there’s a fairly good argument that if I actually wanted to punish myself, I would marry him.’ There was a wail from the back room. Anna and Layla looked across the scrubby London grass to see Dermot comforting one of Layla’s nephews, who he had clearly just whacked in the head with a can of Stella. Dermot saw them both looking at him and did an elaborate apologetic shrug.

‘You see? I can’t marry him,’ said Anna decisively. ‘I’d kill him.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ said Layla. ‘He might kill you.’ And she leaned back, knocking her jacket off the wall. As the bundle fell, Anna saw in it the shape of a baby, and a tiny skull, cracking against brick. She started forward to catch it, then shook her head like a dog trying to get water out of her ears.

Layla put her head on one side. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes!’ said Anna. ‘Are you going to give me a reference?’

‘I don’t know,’ Layla jutted her chin out. ‘Are you going to tell Dermot you’re leaving him?’

‘I’m not leaving him!’ Anna almost yelled. Then added, ‘I don’t think.’



The only other person who could give her a reference was her line manager Yanni, but it didn’t go well from the moment she asked for a quiet word. Yanni closed the door silently and put his head on one side.

‘How are you doing? Mental-health wise?’ Anna knew with a steely certainty that if she showed a moment’s weakness Yanni would use it to cut her hours. Anna was currently temping, having moved from job share to short-term contract at the same organisation, and she had ended up, after eight years and four or five ‘specialities’, being paid almost the same as she had at the start.

‘There’s no shame, you know, in having mental health,’ Yanni said.

‘I have mental health,’ said Anna.

‘You have mental health?’ Yanni got out his special ballpoint.

‘Yes,’ she said. Yanni looked pleased. He clicked out the nib. Anna clarified, ‘I mean, I don’t have mental illness.’ Yanni looked blank. Anna spelled it out, ‘I’m doing OK!’

‘Oh,’ Yanni deflated a little. ‘I’m going to sign you up for four support sessions anyway.’

‘Please don’t do that.’

‘The nature of the work can be very challenging. We have a duty of care to all our staff, even temps.’

Great, now she would have to talk to one of the psychiatrists who littered the place. At various points, it had been Anna’s job to interview them, and they were bastards to a man, including the women. They treated Anna like a schoolgirl. She was pretty sure a couple of them had thought she was on work experience. Last year she’d spoken to one of them and he’d gone straight to Layla, who was managing her at the time. ‘There’s some girl saying she needs to interview me?’

‘Fuck that dick!’ Layla had said. ‘Hasn’t he heard of “I Am A Man”? He can’t treat you like a child. Sexist shit-sack!’

‘Yeah,’ said Anna, making a mental note to google ‘I Am A Man’ as soon as she was alone. Layla had ‘drawn senior management’s attention’ to this alleged slur and now Anna found it even harder to schedule meetings with the psychiatry team. She couldn’t imagine telling her darkest secrets to any one of them.

‘Thank you so much for the offer but . . .’ she began.

‘You’re very lucky to have this level of input from such highly qualified doctors,’ Yanni told her.

The ‘support’ scheme was a new and informal attempt to address the fact that people were constantly going off sick with mental breakdowns. Anna didn’t know if the job did it to them or if the place itself was a psycho-magnet. Yanni loved the scheme because the psychiatrists had to do it for free.

‘I don’t need any support,’ said Anna, ‘there’s nothing wrong with me! Everything’s fine! Everything’s perfect!’

But he signed her up anyway, making her late leaving work.

Anna hurried along the Finchley Road, checking the time on her phone. A text appeared from the Moon app: ‘You are in your fertile window!’ and Anna said, ‘I know!’ out loud to her phone. She needed to get the morning after pill before six. Something about the pill’s ticking clock always made her faintly hysterical. Seventy-two hours! Seventy-two hours to make it to Boots! It was a bit like being in the TV series 24, but three times as long and fighting blastocysts instead of terrorists. Though in a way an embryo was a tiny terrorist, hijacking your womb and driving you headlong into a mountain. Her ‘birthday’ celebrations had been Friday night. Now it was Monday. It hadn’t been her actual birthday, but she had no idea when her real birthday was. Her parents had nominated the twelfth of July. Dermot always took the piss because it was the day of the Orange march.

‘All across Northern Ireland,’ he’d say, ‘they celebrate your birth by beating up Catholics!’ When she was in her twenties, earnest young men with unkempt hair would ask her, ‘What’s your star sign?’ and Anna couldn’t say, ‘I don’t know,’ so she said, ‘Cancer! Means I’m a sceptic, apparently.’ They never laughed. It was five to six when she got there. ‘Have you taken the morning after pill before?’ the chemist said. Anna nodded.

It was all right, she reasoned to herself, as she let herself into their seventh-storey flat, she was taking the pill, there was no cause to panic. Dermot had probably forgotten about the whole proposal thing, and if he hadn’t, she could laugh the whole thing off. But when she went into the front room Dermot was dead.



He was white as milk and lying on the kitchen floor, where it met with the living room, his mouth gaping and drool pooling on the lino. Anna dropped her shopping bag and an inarticulate bark came out of her. She rushed to him, and as she got closer she could see there was something white falling out of his mouth. Should she try to breathe for him? Her stomach turned over as she looked at the pale stuff on his chin. She paused over his breathless body, willing herself to put her lips on his spittle-flecked beard. That was what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it? The lights in the kitchen were throbbing, she could hear the transformers buzzing in the ceiling like deranged wasps. Anna swung her leg across Dermot’s body to straddle him and put both her hands together to place all her weight on his heart, like she’d seen people do in the movies. Where was his heart? Somewhere in the region of his pocket, she guessed, and she crossed her hands over it, then transferred all her weight into his middle, pushing hard on his third button down.

‘Jesus!’ said Dermot, suddenly shoving her full in the chest.

Anna flew backwards off Dermot’s erstwhile corpse and banged her head against their Klippan IKEA sofa.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Dermot yelled, wiping the drool on his face with his lumberjack sleeve.

‘I’m sorry!’ said Anna. ‘I’m so sorry!’ and she rubbed the back of her head.

‘I’m sleeping here!’ Dermot was groggy and slurring. He must have passed out.

‘I thought you were dead!’ Anna protested.

Dermot was now sitting up, orientating himself by groping the fridge like some blind plaid yeti.

‘Why in God’s name would you think that?’ he said.



All Anna knew was that her adoptive parents had got her when she was a few weeks old. She’d been left on a traffic island in an orange handbag.

Anna’s mum, her adoptive mum, had been a lovely woman. Fat. Fat was always the first thing Anna remembered about her – lovely fat arms holding her, the rolls of her lovely belly, which Anna used to bury her little hands between, while her mum told her off. ‘Get off! Get your hands out of there, that’s not for you!’ she’d yell jokingly. Even today Anna couldn’t help associating fat with kindness, even when Dermot would say, ‘Arseholes can be fat too, you know!’ And name all the nasty people in the world who were fat: Kim Jong-un, Eamonn Holmes (while he patted his own round belly). The association of fat with love was early and unbreakable: her lovely, kind, sweet-smelling, fat mum. They had a special way of curling up, Anna draped across her mum’s fatness on the sofa, like an ill-fitting belt. She used to hold her hand in a special way too, sort of hooked around her baby finger. It was a silent communication that said: you are mine. She held her hand that way when she walked her to the local school, where she was a teacher.

Anna’s mum didn’t want her in her class – she was scared she’d be too strict with her – so Anna went in the other class, run by the lady who also taught RE. She was a weird, nervous person who made jokes only she got and then laughed at them too long. In this class Anna was sat on the ‘Robin’ table. Another Robin asked her, ‘Do you speak Jewish?’ and Anna was about to explain it wasn’t a language it was a religion when the teacher interrupted and started laughing too much again. ‘What a question!’ she said. Anna saw her mum at lunchtimes when she’d sneak her a cuddle. When Anna told her mum about the RE teacher her mum was cross.

Anna’s mum had a temper. Sometimes she got really angry with Anna about little things and Anna would be sad, but then she’d say sorry and do a routine acting enraged about everything. ‘Stupid fridge!’ she’d yell. ‘Stupid stapler! Stupid coffee table!’ and she’d pretend to beat stuff up, like she was a wrestler, and Anna would laugh, and everything would be better. And Anna would sneak her little fist in between the layers of Mum’s lovely flesh under her armpit and she’d feel safe.

But she had died, Anna’s mum, when Anna was in the last year of infants, the classroom at the far end of the school, next to the field. A lorry hit her. She was pulling Anna home on a sledge. The bastard psychiatrists would draw looping arrows on their A4 pads as if one thing led to another: pearls on a string. After school Anna would go into her mum’s classroom and read a book or play with Lego until her mum was ready to go. In the winter they tried to get home before dark. That day, Anna had been sent to see the head. There were two tiny grassy swells in the playground, which the kids used to call ‘the humps’. To seven-year-olds, they seemed like hills. It was behind the cover of these mountains that Kevin, a kid whose claim to fame was that he wore adult size five shoes, had asked Anna if she was a boy or a girl. ‘A gel,’ Anna had replied: under the little boy’s threat her Peckham accent had intensified.

‘I don’t think so,’ Kevin had said, ‘you’ve got short hair.’ Kevin checked with his two sidekicks, Big Matthew and Little Matthew, that they’d caught this brilliant piece of observational stand-up comedy.

‘I am!’ she declared. ‘I am a gel!’

‘Pull down her pants!’ yelled Kevin. ‘Check!’

Big Matthew hung back: he clearly didn’t want to. Anna used the pause to say, ‘I’ll smash you!’

‘Girls don’t fight!’ declared Kevin. Anna thumped Kevin in the face. Kevin Size-Fives touched his bleeding nose. ‘Cor!’ he said. ‘You’re strong for a girl.’ Anna had been, as her mother put it, ‘cock-of-the-hoop’.

The head had given Anna lines; she’d had to fill two sides of A4 with the sentence ‘I will not brawl with my little classmates’ until her hand was cramping, and her cockiness was somewhat dented. But her mum had said she had to finish the lines before they went home. ‘I expect you’re proud of yourse. . .