In an effort to also not age, I tried every shade of girlie pink blusher and he said I looked like a spy from the Soviet Bloc, with the stern jaw on me and square shoulders, and duck-egg walls in the house replaced all the yellow magnolia everywhere, except where we had carefully frescoed antique white, and a bed so big, you were guaranteed to never find each other. We had two en-suites at opposite ends of the bedroom.

The fact that he was a real man and a real good man came as a surprise, like that Christmas present hidden far in behind the tree that you find on January sixth when you’re lifting out the Christmas tree. And despite driving each other insane, he was so solid, like a clove drop or bull’s eye or a bullet.

What I lacked in maternal instinct, he had in abundance and what I lacked (or hid) in verbal expressive ability, he made up for, and what he lacked in his pockets, I sorted, and it was topsy-turvy and often neither of us felt particularly good about it. I wanted to express more and he wanted to earn more and perhaps because we went against the status quo, or perhaps because as time went on, I couldn’t cry unless I was drugged or drunk, or because I couldn’t show I loved him, because of my guilt or my constant self-sabotaging that I had become masterful at. And this was the most painful of all.

Some weeks before landing on the Ward, I went back to the Whoopers. I hadn’t been since Magpie. I was feeling weak and restless, and needed to get out of the house. Alex was there, standing with his hands in his back pockets. Wax jacket. A lone black swan glided along the canal water, a wine beak like a velvet cupcake. He appeared to be stooping more now and I hadn’t noticed, and he’d thickened a little around the waist, his laces were undone. He had a chicken roll and a takeaway cup of tea from a petrol station, he smiled and rushed to me when he spotted me, and then very worriedly, remarked how thin I’d become, and not good thin, thinthin, as opposed to thin. He tore the roll in half and shared it with me.

‘Do you know you break bread?’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t ever cut it. I only heard that today. Weird.’

‘Yeah, I think that’s something medieval,’ I said, ‘something to do with knifes and hunting – blood and stuff.’

As a child I had clumsy hands and I found it hard to hold those really fat waxy crayons that the black flecks stuck onto, and I’d colour in a picture, I’d colour it with bright cyan, magenta, yellow, mauve, whatever else I had, and I’d seal the scene shut with inky ebony crayon, then take the back of a steel spoon to it, and release some colour. But the art was never quite right, for when I dug hard at the ebony wax layer, I took the layer of colour underneath also, and the wax rolled up onto the spoon, so that the house I carved or car or dad or dinosaur looked good, but faded, completely faded.