The Broken Pane is a beautiful debut novel that explores family, love, guilt and loss and will simultaneously break and lift your heart. We hope you enjoy this extract that introduces the family in better times.

Extract taken from The Broken Pane
By Charlie Roy
Published by Leamington Books

I do not have a first memory of my little brother. I do not remember my mother being pregnant, or her telling me that a baby was coming to live with us. There is an awareness of Nicky’s presence in my life that appears in my childhood recollections, like a bright light. Can anyone honestly say they remember it all accurately?

My mother, Ange, was pregnant again at the age of twenty one. Not an unusual age to be pregnant in those days, though her contemporaries in the maternity clinic were all anxiously patting their first bumps, asking her for advice on cots and layettes. Shortly after her twenty-second birthday and a relatively quick labour that lasted under three hours, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Nicholas James. This time round, my father Mick waited at the hospital, pacing the halls of the ward, grinding one finished cigarette into the standing ashtrays before immediately lighting the next, breaking only to refill his coffee cup, seasoned with a top note from his flask.

A young nurse came to find him in the late afternoon:

‘Congratulations, Sir, it’s a healthy baby boy.’

To the nurse’s surprise, he hugged her in delight. Mick, I mean Dad, always said that she had looked flabbergasted. He only ever used the word when he told this anecdote, savouring the use of it. I suspect he was not entirely certain of the meaning and had picked it up at the time to use in this specific context. I could never use it without picturing my father, sodden in his cups, welling up over the tale of the birth of his son.

He told it well, the birth of his second child, there at his wife’s bedside as soon as he was summoned, how tenderly they kissed, the baby nestling between them. The room was warm and clean, my mother’s blonde hair gently cascading down a shoulder, glowing with her light of happiness, basking in the joy that he had bestowed on her, a perfect boy.

This vignette was often repeated, the beats familiar, and we, his audience, knew to sigh contentedly at the end of the telling.

Nana’s “dear friend” George came to the hospital a few hours later with me clinging to his enormous hand. He held a camera in the other. With it, he took one of our very few family photos. They may have had an unconventional relationship, but he knew how to step up to the part of Grandpa, albeit unofficially.

In it, my father sits on my mother’s left-hand side, half on the bed with a foot still on the floor, his right arm behind her, supporting himself. She is sitting up, with my brother wrapped in a puce pink blanket cradled in her right arm, and I am sitting in front of them all, by my mother’s right knee, a grinning four-year-old, a mass of unruly black curls with my new blue teddy, Mr Blue, that Nana had given me on the day.

Photographic evidence that we could be a perfect family, no cracks on show.

Truth be told that I do not remember that day. The image is imprinted in my mind, soundtracked by the tale of Nicky’s birth.

I do have a few memories from the following year, the year of my fifth birthday. Like the time my friend from nursery school came round and we spread newspapers on the kitchen table and Mum got us paints and paper. It can’t have been Becky. I didn’t become friends with her until primary school. We daubed it all gleefully and laughed. I have incorporated details such as eating biscuits, and smearing paint on each other’s faces. I am able to remember it clearly because there is a photograph of us, our blue, yellow and green hands waving at the camera. I like this memory.

Mick, I mean Dad, swept me up into his arms every morning, with a ‘be good, Duckling’ and a kiss on the forehead. Then he set off to work, giving Mum a peck on the lips on the way out, and I would run to the window to wave, my hair set neatly in bunches.

It was a perfect snow globe time in our lives. I recall being held up so that I could, look down into Nicky’s crib at the sleeping baby, his farm mobile playing a tune as it cranked round, the bright pink pig somehow more incongruous than the blue sheep. I revisit myself sat playing with a rosy-cheeked infant. I paint it in my mind as a warm and happy time, all together. I know this because Mick, I mean Dad, has often told me the stories of how good it was back then, when my mother was a gentle angel, I was a good girl and Nicky was a precious gift.

One of Nicky’s favourites from the Book of 101 Jokes which he carried about for weeks was ‘What is the opposite of a snow globe?’. He would stare intently at the adult he quizzed for a moment before shouting ‘A lava lamp!’ and burst into peals of giggles. His audience would laugh too, relieved to be off the hook. I always thought that wasn’t quite right as a lava lamp has the same mesmerising effect as a snow globe. The exact opposite would be disturbing to watch.

There are times in your life you can hold like a perfect snow globe, some memories are the exact opposite lava lamps, made of real lava, too hot to hold in your mind.

The Broken Pane by Charlie Roy is published by Leamington Books, priced £16.99.