I didn’t get further than the hallway before I broke down. Above the hall table, there was a photo of the two of us. We’re on the beach at Whitley Bay, near Newcastle – one of Mum’s favourite places on earth. I’m fourteen or fifteen, mugging at the camera from beneath an unfortunate Britpoppy fringe. Mum has her arm wrapped tightly around me, and her blonde hair is whipping about wildly in the sea wind. But through it all, you can still see her bright smile and her blue-green eyes, sparkling with laughter and life.

I pulled the picture off the wall and crumpled onto the floor, my back pressed up against the front door. I don’t know how long I sat there staring at it, crying so hard that my entire body was shaking. Because it hit me then, quite suddenly, that this was real. That this nightmare was actually happening. That my mum was gone, and something inside me was broken and might never be fixed.

Her phone was still on the hall table – she was always forgetting to take it out with her – and I sat there calling it over and over again, crying harder and harder each time her voicemail kicked in. She sounded so real, so alive. How could she be gone? It didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t.

The days after that were a blur. There were forms to fill in – endless fucking forms. There were trips to the funeral director’s office. I would sit there next to Simon in that bleak little room on Ealing High Road and think how absurd it seemed to be discussing things like flowers and food at a time like this. Mum was dead, the ground was cracking beneath me, and here I was talking about whether I preferred lilies or chrysanthemums. What the fuck did it matter? What did anything matter now?

The funeral itself I remember in random stop-motion snatches. The unreal horror of the coffin behind the podium. The way Uncle Simon’s face seemed to collapse as he stood up to give the eulogy. I was supposed to speak, too. I was meant to read a poem – a Walt Whitman thing, one of Mum’s favourites. But a couple of days before, I’d decided I couldn’t do it, for fear of breaking down in front of everyone.

I’ve always regretted that.

I remember staring around the church while Simon was speaking, to see if my dad had bothered to show up. I’d been so certain that he would. That he would step back into my life today, when I needed him most.

But no.

When the service finished, even through the blinding misery, I felt a violent stab of anger at him for that. Of all the shitty things he’d done to her – to us – that seemed to be the shittiest.