Wow. So vastly, impossibly ancient. He looked smart and rich and like he’d been around all the blocks. I hadn’t even been around our block. I tucked my feet up and sat, knees making a rhombus – greeting him, and all exciting men, everywhere!

I heard the glasses she was holding tinkle. I didn’t turn. I sat there, eyes on Roger’s eyes, waiting, counting. Two seconds, three. What time is it, Mrs Wolf? Her hands clamped onto my shoulders. She hauled me out to the hall.

You’re too old to sit like that.

She wanted me to cry. I wanted to cheer. I suppose because I felt like we were finally on the edge of something real. She wasn’t protecting me with her anger – not like when I ran near the road or went missing in shops. There was fear in her eyes along with the anger, I could see that, but there was also a third emotion – one she wasn’t comfortable with, but one she couldn’t suppress. Aha! Ahaha! Oh, the pitiless epiphanies of the child confronting the threshold guardian. She was my end-of-level boss, the obstacle between me and some higher plane; some outside; and I would defeat her eventually, and she knew it. Those spurts of golden growth – they come like sailors, giving everything, taking everything.

And then one day, Roger stopped coming.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘It ran its course,’ my mother said. ‘As all relationships with men should.’

I looked in her eyes for the lie. She stared back, like she always did, with her eyes folded. I’d looked into her eyes so many times, in real life and in photographs, trying to do a sort of past-life regression on myself. And what of my mother’s childhood?

The McLaine Sisters were four redheaded sisters, my mother being the eldest by three years. Even my grandparents saw their children as a novelty – they made them sing together in competitions on holiday in Rhyll, Blackpool, and other such seaside towns. My mother said they lined up in a row on stage, like the von Trapps. They wore black jodhpurs and white blouses and grey waistcoats, like four little horsewomen. (‘Not my first rodeo,’ my mother says, every time she’s about to go on stage.) They usually won, but when they didn’t it rather ruined the holiday. My mother still throws out a tune when she has a drink in her. She’s what you might call a loose karaoke cannon.

What does your mother do? the kids asked at school.

She’s an actress, I said.