I’d gone round to a friend’s house and her father had made me cry because he’d said: Well, I bet they don’t have to worry when they run out of fuse wire in your house. Incidentally, this same man later said to another friend, who dropped a peanut down her top: It’s good to see Victoria is finally developing a figure. Appropriateness was not the man’s forte.

My mother came to pick me up in the car – a Mercedes, I think it was then – and she looked at my face and just knew (it wouldn’t take a psychic …).

‘What’s happened?’ she said.

I told her.

She put the car into Park and got out. ‘Wait here,’ she said.

She walked up to the door. She rapped. He answered.

‘You seem to think my daughter’s hair colour is amusing,’ she said. ‘Which I think is troublesome, if not pathetic, for a man of your age.’ I could hear every word, even though she had her back to me. What can I say, the woman could project.

He said something, probably sarcastic.

She said, ‘Don’t pick on the remarkable people. Go back in there with your ordinary-coloured hair to all your ordinary-coloured-hair family and live out your ordinary little lives. Meanwhile my daughter and I will be over here, being extraordinary.’

‘Is that why her father’s never been around?’ he said. (I heard that part.) ‘You were too extraordinary, were you?’

‘No, he was too dead.’

My friend’s father’s face dropped. ‘Oh god, I’m sorry, Carmen, I had no idea.’

‘That’s your problem,’ my mother said, her parting shot. ‘You have no idea.’

She got back in the car and started the engine.

‘My father’s dead?’ I said.

‘No,’ said my mother, shifting the car into Drive. ‘But it was a great line, don’t you think?’

I stared at my friend’s father as we drove away.

I SAY

‘Look, Mum, that text was a mistake, and even if it wasn’t, even if it was on some level some weird Freudian cry for help, it just would not work you staying here, even for one night. I’m sorry.’

I say it quietly, like I’m not sure whether I believe it.

My mother is nodding, yes yes, in that way she does, after which she just does whatever the fuck she wants. She is staring at Sid.

‘The treasure of your life,’ my mother says, ‘is everyone’s to steal. Because she only steals from her point of view. It’s her experience of your treasure, so it cannot be stolen.’

‘It’s a garbage thing to do,’ says Sid. ‘It’s not the truth.’

‘The truth doesn’t exist. Now, go put your lady balls in a bag and skedaddle.’

Sid says: ‘I bet you voted for Brexit.’

‘Goodbye!’