Black walls, black doors, black ceiling, black desk, black window frames.

When I was twelve I came home from school one day to find my mother painting my bedroom black.

'What's going on?' I asked.

'I'm painting your bedroom black,' she said, with that edge in her voice that told me she and my father had had a row.

I went back downstairs to see what had happened. Yes, they had had a row. The air in the house was thicker and my father moved things around differently. On an ordinary day this would drive me to the top of the stairs with the dog, the two of us clinging on to each other, not wanting to hear what was going on but keeping our ears pricked up anyway in case we missed something. But this was no ordinary day — I was getting a black bedroom, something I'd always wanted. The dog slunk off to sit by himself behind the sofa.

By day my mother was a cleaner at a local school but by night she was a great artist. She had a studio — an old shed — at the back of the garden, full of paint and oil and chicken-wire and clay. If you went anywhere near that shed you'd get paint on you. (Sometimes if you even just thought hard enough about that shed you'd get paint on you, so watch out). She drew portraits of people from the village and landscapes of the mountains and the sheep and sometimes she sculpted clay heads of the men she'd met along the way. And then, when we needed the money, she'd just forge a Renoir or a Degas or a fake Van Gogh.

One day my father said Mary, wouldn't it be nice if every time we looked up from the sofa in the living room we could see the sky sitting right up there above our heads? Nobody could think of anything nicer than that, so my mother got up a ladder and painted a cloudscape right up there on the living room ceiling. And now, to this day, every time you look up from the sofa it's like the sky is sitting right up there above your head.

When she was done painting my bedroom black we stood in it, the four of us — me, my mother, my father, the dog — and looked around. Black walls, black doors, black ceiling, black desk, black window frames, black chest of drawers.

'It's very dark, isn't it?' said my mother, dubiously.

'It might brighten up a bit once you put your posters back up,' said my father, who had stopped moving things around differently by now.

'But this is how I like it,' I said, even though it was darker than I had ever really expected an entirely black bedroom to be.

The dog went back behind the sofa.