Chapter 11. I Have Failed Her

The First Stars

Your 12-words chapters are the Big Bang. Expansion. The plasma. Anomalies gather into clouds of gas.

• Clouds of Gas (and Dust): Stars begin their lives in massive, cold, dense clouds of interstellar gas (mostly hydrogen) and dust, called molecular clouds.
• Nebula / Star Nursery: These clouds are referred to as star-forming nebulae or stellar nurseries, acting as the birthplace of stars.

8-stations mind-mapping is gravity. Condensing the clouds of gas. It collapses. Stars ignite.

• Gravity Condenses: Due to disturbances (like a shockwave from a nearby supernova or a collision with another cloud), gravity causes regions within the nebula to collapse.
• Star Formation: As the gas and dust condense and collapse, they heat up, creating a core that becomes a protostar, and finally, a full-fledged star. 

Our First Stars

I always start the mind-map on the right-hand page. I write my discoveries second, on the left. Sometimes on the following page.

Monday 23.02.26

Ignites

This is how it begins. My mum says I have to try harder. The Art’s Council still single me out. We will help you try harder. We will give you a leg up. They are still looking through the same mirror as my mum. She is seeing herself in the mirror. She is also seeing herself reflected in her child. Herself reflected in her child. And what it says about her. What the world thinks about her. What the world thinks about what she has done. What the world thinks about her child. She is trying to protect her child. She is trying to protect her child, but she agrees with the world. Her eyes see that I am disadvantaged. Her eyes tell her that I am not full. I am not on parr. I am not equivalent. That she shouldn’t have shagged a black man. Or she is trying to arm me. Like an African American has their race conversation with their 14-year-old son. Self-prophesied. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Is it? It is scary. What are you teaching your child about itself? About the world? Should you tell it, or shouldn’t you? What danger do you put it in if you do tell it? What danger do you put it in if you don’t?

Tuesday 24.02.26

Ignites

1959. Richard Burton in Look Back in Anger is on at the pictures when she leaves the pictures already pregnant with me — I am born into a changing world.

Sleeping Beauty is also released that year. My mum conspires with the fairy who conjures the ghosts in my nursery who dictates the limits of what I can be.

1963. The blue and cream jug flying above our heads put mine and Elaine’s peace asleep for 60 years.

Wednesday 25.02.26

Ignites

Suppose her act of telling me I must do better is completely selfless and to protect me.

Suppose using her dead husband’s pension is completely selfless. She does it to protect me. So, I will, me and my siblings, always have a home and the only way she can do this is if his name is the only one on the mortgage and she has a rent book because I think they are more means tested back then. And he just keeps the bank book. She is absolutely not entitled to. Even when he is dead. She screams about it. What if she hasn’t made herself a doormat but is protecting us.

Suppose when she is lying in the hospital aged 44 with her first heart attack, she thinks it is her punishment. It is only 11 years after leaving them. What if she is making a pilgrimage to see them. But when she gets there, she is shocked they are not baby Margaret and her 2 boys. They’re teenagers. Which makes it more obvious to her what she has done. She can’t turn back time.

Suppose when she gets back, she is grateful to have us. But Angie, tactfully, strategically, poisons her. Which makes her angry because she can’t undo the past. And Angie is a reminder, here in Moss Side with her, and not in that house on the banks of the Shannon in Ireland where the other 3 are living with their maiden aunt Madeline — that cunt.

Suppose she just hates the dreariness of the back living room that never gets the sun the day she propels me and my Dick Whittington bundle into the empty sand dunes she has just left with her Dick Whittington.

Thursday. 26.02.26

Ignites 

The bravery. The stupidity. Irish women are not English women. I cannot go to the ball. I can never be a debutante. She has condemned me. She knows she has. She has been thinking about it. You must do better than everyone else.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson defines why.

The 8 Pillars of Caste:

1. Divine Will and the Laws of Nature: The belief that the hierarchy is preordained by God or is a natural, immutable order.
2. Heritability: Caste is inherited and determined at birth, allowing no mobility to change one's status.
3. Endogamy and Control of Marriage/Mating: Strict rules against marriage or reproduction outside one's caste to maintain the purity and rigidity of the structure.
4. Purity v Pollution: The idea that the dominant group is pure and must be protected from pollution by lower-caste individuals.
5. Occupational Hierarchy: The assignment of work based on caste, typically reserving desirable jobs for the top and manual/menial work for the bottom.
6. Dehumanisation and Stigma: Stripping lower-caste members of their humanity through stereotypes and abuse to justify their subordination.
7. Terror as Enforcement. Cruelty as a Means of Control: Using violence and fear, such as lynchings or public punishment, to enforce caste boundaries.
8. Superiority v Inferiority: The deeply ingrained belief that the top group is inherently better, and the bottom group is inherently lesser. 

She is invoking all of that when she says you have to do better than all others. Like she can undo the spell cast in my nursery, that the fairies brought to my nursery when I come out of a white womb with non-white skin. A part of her has to disown me. I can never truly be hers. I can never truly be his either. It must play the other way around. Does he think I am worth more than him?

I am brushing Rachel’s hair. She is aged about 14. I am stood behind her in the mirror over our fireplace. It takes over. Visceral. Not something, I think. Something I feel. We are alive in it.  Bigger. Deeper. Inside. It is in both our DNA. That she is worth more than me. Her quarter-caste skin is worth more than mine. And I must care for it with my life.

It happens again. 25 years later. Her baby has died. She is in the bath. It feels like a cowboy bath. With a slanted back. I am washing her back. I am her servant. I am her slave. I have failed her.

Friday 27.02.26

 Ignites

When my mum walks onto the stage, her heart is already broken. Its blood is the floor of my stage. The glue he uses to imprison her. Her feet are already stuck to the floor. She has found out that Double Indemnity does not work, or she would have stayed with the money. He must have his eye on the money or why doesn’t he be fair and leave it to her in his will. No, the house is his. She carries on living with the man who pulls wool over her eyes, though the femme fatales she studies are the ones who make the killing.

She is the granddaughter of a saint; the daughter of a whore; she does well for herself. Then gets tricked.

Her heart is indeed broken before the ambulance comes for her that night. Maybe she tries to go home. To Ireland. It is insane to think of her on the boat doing the flip the other way around. I believe in my heart she is leaving us to go back to her real life. Her authentic life. Her moneyed life.

You have to do better because of the colour of your skin is to help me get my hands on the money. Like Barbara Stanwyck and Fred McMurray, they are as bad as each other. One of them has to die. 

Star Generations

These 8-station mind-maps are our first stars. In our first galaxies. They can’t sustain life. They are too big. Too hot. Burn too quickly. Can’t manufacture the necessary elements.

1. Population III Stars (The First-Generation Stars)

These are the first stars to ever exist in the universe. They formed roughly 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang. 

• Composition: They were made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Any element heavier than helium is called a metal. These stars are metal-free.
• Size: Because they lacked metals to help radiate heat away during formation, they are believed to have been massive, hundreds of times the mass of our Sun.
• Legacy: They lived fast and died in violent supernovae, seeding the universe with the very first heavy elements (oxygen, carbon, iron, etc.). 

2. Population II Stars (The Second-Generation Stars)

The second stars form from the same gas clouds, that is now polluted by the remains of the first stars. 

• Composition: They are metal-poor. They contain small amounts of heavy elements, but far less than stars like our Sun.

3. Population I Stars (The Modern Stars)

Our Sun is a Population I star. 

• Composition: They are metal-rich. They form from gas recycled through many generations of previous stars.

Creating our Second-Generation Stars

8-station mind-map the original gas cloud again. (The 8 linked discoveries you made when you fused your 12-word chapters together.) Now polluted by the remains of our first-generation stars.

My original gas cloud:

·      Chapter 1: Compulsion to be better than others. Links to:

·      Chapter 5: Mum telling me I must do better than everyone cos of the colour of my skin.

·      Chapter 2: My mum is a doormat for my dad. Using her dead husband’s pension to fund the house he owns. Links to:

·      Chapter 6: She may have gone to see her other kids in Limerick cos she genuinely believes her heart will kill her soon.

·      Chapter 3: I am already in her tummy coming out of the pictures. Links to:

·      Chapter 7: My great nanna, nanna, mum, me, my daughter are Russian doll eggs.

·      Chapter 4: Me and Elaine staring at each other through the handle of her navy Silver-cross trolley as the blue and cream jug flies over our heads. Links to:

·      Chapter 8: We don't need freedom because of our colour or race. We just need the freedom of peace. Demonstrated in the other photos Elaine has been sending me this week. Of her stylish sideboard, and her graceful drop-leaf table, and their positioning. Building her new, solitary, peaceful, country home. And my comments of encouragement because I am the eldest. Building my solitary, peaceful, country home.

My original gas cloud is now polluted by what you have read here today.

Log Your Second-Generation Stars

·      Daily, except Saturday, in your sacred hour in your sacred place, 8-station mind-map your original 8 discoveries again.

·      Longhand, let go, let your discoveries ignite.

·      Type them up.

·      Same rule as 12-words you can’t change anything.

·      Pair them with their mind-map as I have done here.

·      Create a file.

·      Log them there.  

Log Your First-Generation Stars — Sorry

I should have told you to do this last week. Please, type up last week’s discoveries, following above steps.

Also, it wasn’t beneficial to have 8 individual discoveries. The discoveries have become more fluid. I let go to this.

Only by doing this chapter have I discovered how to do these. I will be able to add these findings with examples in the finished book.