When I am ready I wander along the hall towards the sad back room with the draughty window. The house creaks around me. The complaining crackles of the pipes and the floors. Familiar and unfamiliar sounds. For the first time, I feel the house’s loneliness. A wintry sort of longing. My mother is in Sid’s old room. Also the room of something that was not to be.

My mother is doing her vocal exercises. I peer in. What was once a big, bare space is now a messy, pleasant room. There is a tapestry throw over the bed. On the bookshelves are various objets d’art, French-sounding perfumes, powder puffs. There’s a Cow & Gate formula tin, one of my old ones, that she keeps samples of beauty products in. She is half naked, on the bed, her back to me, sitting on a towel. She is wearing the ‘quick-drying’ pink towel turban she always wears when her hair is wet. She stops noodling when she sees me. She puts on a hotel bathrobe from The Shelbourne, Dublin. As she changes, I ogle her body the way I have always ogled it – with wonder, gratitude, fear, and a profound self-reflexive humiliation. Her lower back and thighs are clawed with fading red stretch marks that, if I’m not careful, I might start to romanticise.

‘You kept that old tin! Why?’

‘It’s as good a receptacle as any. Just because all of your shit is in a cloud, darling.’

‘It’s not. A lot of it is in your garage.’

My childhood and teen years are chronicled in six or seven boxes in her double garage. Polaroids and airline tickets, soft toys and plastic tat, paperclips and hairgrips shoaling like krill. Tax receipts, key rings, snapped candles in whisky bottles. The fall-out of every ending. The episodes of my life set in amber. I have moved from mammal to mammal, like a flea.

‘Not any more,’ she says, starting to apply her primer. ‘I had a clear-out.’

‘What?’

‘I skipped it. Sorry, darling, I applied the six-year rule. If you haven’t needed it in six years, it can probably go.’

‘Those were my old school books! My A-level files!

‘You did all right on them, didn’t you?’

‘In spite of you! You never respected my work!’

‘Ditto.’

She moves and I catch a scent of her coconut body butter – the same brand for thirty years now. She starts on her foundation, smoothing it over her cheekbones and eye sockets. She overplucked her eyebrows in the seventies and has been drawing them in ever since in a thin Garbo arch. There are two gin and tonics on the dresser.

I sniff. ‘One of your eyebrows is higher than the other today.’

‘Eyebrows are sisters, not twins, darling.’

I stare hard at her face some more. And some more.