“Home, Mum!” Toni called, inhaling the sting of disinfectant. “Cup of tea?”
     She slung her school bag onto the stairs and ran into the kitchen, lathering up plenty of antibacterial lemongrass soap at the sink to scrub her hands. Working fast – she was already late – she warmed the teapot as Mum had taught her and spooned in loose-leaf rooibos. When it had brewed, she carried the bone-china cup through, set it on a coaster and made a show of swiping around it with the ever-present duster. “Want the TV on?”
     Mum’s fingertips twitched at her earlobes, twisting the silver acorn studs she wore round and around.
     Toni flicked through channels until she found a nature documentary where giraffe families gathered in towers.
     Behind the TV, Aunt Anita and Mum stood frozen in their picture frame, aged eleven and thirteen with hair braided and beaded like Toni’s. Now that she was twelve, Toni imagined herself pulled between them, another sister.
     When the first lockdown began, the world shifted in a way that clicked it in sync with her Mum. Staying home became a rule for everyone, with each trip outside followed by fastidious handwashing. It was like Mum had been preparing for this global crisis for as long as Toni remembered.
     The next day, like every day, Toni finished her homeschooling as fast as possible before trotting down to Aunt Anita’s VR cinema on Bristol’s waterfront. It gave Mum the space she said she needed and got Toni out under the sky.
     Toni thought ‘cinema’ was a desperately grand title for the two small rooms Anita leased, one serving as reception, the other bare but for eight carefully spaced office chairs.
     Anita sourced virtual reality movies from all over: Paris, Pakistan, Ghana, Canada, Italy. You could step into Notre Dame before it had burned down or watch blue whales breach off the Sri Lankan coast without leaving your home city. Better for the environment, Anita said. Soon restrictions would lift and people would be hungry for adventures again, even virtual ones.
     Toni swung her school bag so it crossed the cinema’s threshold and was sun-drenched briefly before veering back into the shade. “What’s virtual reality, anyway?”
     Anita crouched low, painting the window. In turquoise lettering as curly as her own dark hair, she wrote: Unlock our entire planet right here!
     “Something dreamt up that feels real.” Her eyes skittered towards Toni. “Or maybe something was once real and could be again.”
     Toni sniffed and scuffed her feet against the concrete floor. With the door open, the tang of paint competed with the reek of a grimy sleeping bag slumped near the dock-edge. It looked like it could slide into the water at any second, like if she blinked it might turn out to be a seal.
     Beside a crate of virtual reality masks on the cinema’s reception desk sat a tower of discs shinier than any others among Anita’s stock. Toni picked one up, slipping it from its sleeve to admire how it glimmered.
     “Got those cheap from a closing down sale.” Anita’s smile broadened. “Next generation virtual reality, aromas and all. I’m making my own using the same tech, targeting olfactory sensory neurons. They’re the key, those smells.”
     Toni wanted to cast the disc from her, frisbee-like. She’d seen that expression on her aunt’s face before. It meant Anita was in thrall to some idea that would end in Toni’s Mum yelling.
     As though she’d heard Toni’s thoughts, Anita added: “I’ll invite your ma to come and watch one I made for her especially.”
     Toni returned the disc to the box. “What’s the point?” She pitched her tone skeptical in the way she’d learnt from her mum. “You know she won’t come.”
     Anita’s smile shrank, but remained stuck in place. Her eyes skipped from corner to corner as she set the paintbrush aside. “She can’t stay in that house forever.”
     Toni’s dad had said something similar the last time he and Toni met. She glanced beyond the cinema window at a seagull tottering towards a rank day-old burger, jabbing at the rotting meat. “Why not?”
     Instead of answering, Anita retrieved the jar of almond butter she almost always carried. She took Toni’s hands and smoothed sweet-scented cream over skin sore from washing.
     “We’re not supposed to touch.”
     “We’re in a support bubble,” Anita said, “You, me and your ma.”
     Toni wondered how that could be true when Anita never came over anymore.
     Anita busied herself with screwing the cap onto the jar. “Tell me something I might not know,” she said.
     Toni thought for a moment, filling her mind with the lapping of breeze-ruffled water. “Our city’s old Saxon name means ‘place of the bridge’, so Bristol Bridge is basically Bridge Bridge. And Avon’s a Celtic word for river so the River Avon’s called River River…” She hesitated, grinning. “We live where the River River runs under Bridge Bridge.”
     Anita’s laughter creased her eyes into crescents.
     “Now you,” Toni said. “Tell me something I don’t know. About you and Mum.”
     Anita nodded, choosing a memory. “Ok, but this one’s not pretty. Your ma and I once found a dead squirrel.”
     “Where was it?”
     “In the woodland behind your gran’s house. It lay on the ground with fallen beech and oak leaves, like its heart had simply stopped. Your ma tried her best, but nothing could bring it back.”
     “What did you do?”
     “We dug a hole as a grave. Your ma tucked an acorn in with it. We hoped a tree might grow and mark the spot.”
     “Did it?”
     Anita nodded. “Last time I visited, the oak was four times as tall as you and full of leaping squirrels.” She reached for the shining discs. “Fancy watching a film?”
     “Sure.” Toni picked a chair in the middle of the room, spinning left and right. The seat felt spindly beneath her.
     Anita handed her a VR mask. Pulling it on she found it covered her whole head. It was like lowering herself into a dark cave. Flashes of light danced at the perimeter of her vision until she felt she might slip into the gaps between sparks.
     The darkness bloomed into a scene crowded with people. They pressed against Toni from every direction. She breathed in a musky odour that reminded her of an ancient cat that once lived with Anita. Tables surrounded her where fish flapped, gasping in buckets of water. Animals she knew from TV cowered in cages. She saw a pangolin with clipped claws and chipped scales, and an albino python too sick to eat the damaged, jerking mice in its bowl. Toni stood on tiptoe, looking for Anita, but everyone nearby was a stranger.
     None of them cared who or how she was.
     In an instant, the mask was off and Anita was holding her. “What is it, pet? What’s wrong?”
     “I was lost,” she snuffled, wiping her damp face. “Don’t make me do that again.”
     “The new generation films are all different. I’ll choose more carefully next time.”
     They left the cinema when the sky was thinning at its edges. A cormorant streaked past with its neck held as long and straight as a thrown javelin.
     A man sat on the harbour wall, sneakered feet dangling over water where moorhens and plastic coffee cup lids bobbed. He moved his arms as though swimming – hands together, elbows bent, scooping out and in, over and over.
     Toni wondered where he was trying to go.
                                                                                          *
Mum hadn’t come to see Toni star as lead shepherd in her last primary school nativity, or rescued Toni when Dad left her at a café where two roads intersected. In both cases Anita stepped in, bore witness, brought Toni home.
     Before Dad moved out, Toni told her school friends her parents were arguing. In truth, Dad would mutter and fidget while Mum glared, fiddling with her earrings and working her jaw like she was chewing over his words and didn’t want to speak with her mouth full.
     The day Dad dumped Toni at the café was just before the COVID-19 pandemic reached the UK. Her heart hopscotched in her chest when he arrived at the school gate.
     “What are you doing here? What’s happened?”
     “I missed you is what’s happened! Let’s go for a drive.”
     She flung a “Catch ya later!” to her friends and raced him to the car.
     At the café they ate salty, rubbery burgers. Toni watched her dad as she ate. His eyes fixed on his food with a rigidness that made her nervous.
     “Mum knows where I am, right?” she checked. “She gets… you know… if I’m even a half hour late.”
     “She knows. She knows.”
     “Who’s going to make her tea?”
     He looked at her, his eyes sad and sort of fierce. “Ahh, Toni, that’s not for you to worry about.”
     He described how her mum had been when they first got together and she was training to be a farm vet, glittering with excitement about a future of calves, lambs and endless fields.
     “Foot and Mouth hit in February 2001, when she was still training. Then the first mass slaughters began, thousands of farm stock culled.” He sighed, stabbing a wilting paper straw into his cola. “By October, almost six million animals were dead.”
     Toni put down her burger. The charred meat stench drifting from the café kitchen seemed to thicken until she struggled to swallow.
     “Your mum would come home grieving. She became a vet to heal sick animals, not murder healthy ones. After a while, she stopped going out, stopped sleeping. I’d find her bleaching kitchen surfaces at 3am.” He paused as if allowing Toni time to express dismay, but it was all too familiar.
     “When you were born, I thought she was better. Her shine came back, for a bit.” He leaned across the table suddenly and squeezed her hand. “I’m moving to Murcia in Spain for work. You should go with me, Toni.”
     Toni’s lungs tightened in her chest. “Mum needs me. You went. I can’t.”
Dad said he was leaving her at the café so her mum would have no choice but to come and get her.
     Instead, she’d sent Anita.
                                                                                          *
The next time Anita asked Toni to tell her something real, Toni thought of her mum and said, “Giraffe families live in groups called Towers.”
     Anita nodded. “I guess they’re so tall they can always look out for each other.”
     “Yeah.” Toni grabbed Anita’s hand. “I’d like to try another of your virtual reality movies, if that’s ok. I’m ready.”
     Anita’s solemn expression broke into a beam and Toni felt glad.
     “This is the one I made for your ma,” her aunt said. “I promise it’s not scary at all.
     Toni pulled on the mask.
     Almost immediately, she could smell green. The fragrance rose up around her, rich and damp. Toni blinked, and a forest came into focus. Beech and oak trees shook golden leaves in a breeze that seemed to tug at her hair where wisps escaped her braids.
     She spun, slowly, taking in tree trunks, branches, fungi that frilled outwards like brims of stacked hats. Moss shimmered. Birds and insects sang.
     The arc of her spin set Toni before a sunlit space where two girls close to her in age sat digging in the soil. They were almost near enough to touch. She could hear chattering voices as shrill as gulls, and see hair braided and beaded like hers.
     As she watched, one held up a single acorn and pressed it into the shallow hole.
     Toni peered in and saw an animal that looked like it was sleeping. The heart-stopped squirrel, its tail wrapped around it like a blanket.
     The bigger of the two girls stroked one finger over the animal’s nose. Her expression was gentle and unafraid. In that moment she lifted her chin and her eyes met Toni’s. They looked at each other, unwavering.
     Anita gently eased the mask off over Toni’s braids. “Think your ma will come, if I ask?”
     When Anita had brought Toni home from the cafe, the sisters started shouting. Huddled in her room, Toni heard Mum yell: “I’m not a problem to be solved!”
     It was like the angry words she’d never said to Toni’s dad were erupting over Anita.
     Now, Toni stared past her aunt to the crate of VR masks. “Maybe to want to come outside you’ve got to remember who you are inside.”
     Anita laughed. “When d’you get so profound, pet?”
     Toni grinned and shrugged.
                                                                                          *
Anita stood beside Toni in the living room doorway, eyes jumping. Mum’s gaze lifted from the blank TV screen and Toni saw a flinch of the unexpected pass between them.
     “All right, pet?” Kneeling in front of Mum on the carpet flattened from excessive vacuuming, Anita rubbed the VR mask with disinfectant until it gleamed.
     Carefully, Anita placed the mask over Mum’s head. Toni saw Mum’s shoulders tense, and, gradually, relax. She heard Mum inhale sharply and then exhale long and slow.
     When Mum removed the mask, her cheeks were wet. She gaped at Anita. “What is this?”
     For once Anita’s eyes stopped their darting. “Not a solution,” she promised. “I’m not trying to solve anything, just give you a memory from before.”
     Anita tsked softly at the sight of Mum’s hands and took the jar of almond butter from her bag. Toni watched as she massaged the cool cream gently into Mum’s roughened skin.
     Mum’s acorn earrings sparked silver in the sun. She leaned back in her seat, but she didn’t pull away.