I drop the calendar back onto the table. It takes me a couple of seconds to figure out the significance of this date. If my maths is right, then Daff and I have now been going out for just over a year, and today – Christmas Eve 2006 – is the first time she ever came to my house. In fact, it’s the first time she ever met my …

I hear spoons tinkling and cups clinking downstairs, and my stomach instantly turns in on itself. My chest knots so tightly that for a second I think I might pass out, and there’s a sudden hard, hot pressure thundering behind my eyeballs.

‘Benjamin!’ Mum yells up the stairs. ‘Will you please – please – get your backside out of bed and come and help your poor mother?’

And the next thing I know, I am crying so hard I can barely breathe.

Chapter Thirteen

Mum died on November 26th, 2018.

It was a Monday – a grey, drizzly, nothingy Monday – and I was coming back from work when I got the text.

I was temping at a travel agency at the time, spending forty hours a week knocking out press releases about Pacific cruises for the over-sixties. It was around 7 p.m., the end of yet another mindless, monotonous day, and I felt my phone buzz in my pocket as I stepped off the Tube. I remember staring down at the name on the screen. My uncle Simon, Mum’s brother. That’s weird, I thought. I don’t think Simon’s ever messaged me before.

All it said was: Are you at home?

I texted back: In about 20 mins – why? But there was no reply.

As soon as I got in the front door, I called Mum to see if she knew what was up with him. It went straight to voicemail, her cheery voice ringing out in my ear: ‘So sorry, but I can’t come to the phone right now …’ Even then, I didn’t make the connection. It didn’t even cross my mind. Why would it?

When Simon knocked on the door a few minutes later, my first thought was that he’d had an accident. His shoulders were hunched, his eyes red raw and his face twisted like he was in agony.

I asked him what was wrong, but he walked past me and said, ‘Let’s go in and sit down.’ And when we were sitting at the kitchen table, he just came out with it: ‘Ben. I’ve come from the hospital. I’m so sorry, but something terrible’s happened. Your mum’s died.’

And that was it. Just like that, the world ended.

Simon told me later – months later – that the nurse had instructed him to say it that way. Direct and to the point. No beating around the bush. Like pulling off a plaster.