I find my mother asleep in the lounge, the TV on – some awful serial-killer drama blaring towards its denouement. But nobody could have predicted what she’d find in the garbage … A half-empty gin bottle is on the floor, where it has fallen from her hand. A glass is balanced on the arm of the chair. There are melba toast crumbs on a plate on her lap. The room otherwise is neat and tidy – it’s like when they find incidents of spontaneous human combustion and there’s a radius of charred destruction and, beyond that, disquieting normality. I found her once on the bathroom floor, unconscious, face down, her fingers flexed, her nails in the grouting, like she’d been trying to claw her way out.

Her laptop is there on the floor. I open it and see there are tabs open – tabs on all my social media. My Twitter, my Instagram, my columns, my practically defunct website.

I turn off the TV. She wakes up.

‘Jenny! Sorry, I must have drifted off.’

I nod.

She collects her laptop from the floor. ‘I’ve started to pack,’ she says. ‘I’ll be out by nine a.m. tomorrow.’

I nod again.

‘Have you had a bad day, darling?’

‘I really have nothing to measure that against any more.’

‘Do you want a melba toast?’

I shake my head. ‘I think I’m going to go out and meet my friend Nicolette for a few drinks tonight.’

She replies almost too quickly: ‘Of course! You enjoy yourself! Here,’ she fumbles around on the floor for her bag, her purse, and takes out a fifty-pound note – a fifty-pound note! Saints alive – and hands it to me. ‘Get you and your friend a bottle of something nice on me.’

I sniff and take the money. ‘Thank you.’ Then a voice pops out before I can stop it. ‘Will you be here when I get back?’

‘Of course I’ll be here! I’m not going until the morning, remember.’

I nod. I stand there, coddled in this knowledge.

‘I took your advice, by the way. I went to see a therapist.’

I look at her. ‘No way.’

‘Way.’

‘You said you didn’t believe in therapy. You said you were too old. You said it made people worse.’

‘All those things may well be true, but I took your advice.’

‘And?’

‘It was as I suspected. My mother messed me up but I also owe all my success to her. A poisoned chalice is still a chalice, Jenny.’

‘I’ll pass on the poisoned chalice, thanks.’

‘Shame you don’t get a choice.’

‘Watch me.’

‘She asked me about my worst memory.’

‘Full on. No foreplay.’

‘I started telling her about the death of my mother, and how I missed it by five minutes.’ I look down. ‘And then I realised that wasn’t it at all. It was finding your suicide note.’