At the end of my visit, one of the carers found the doll under Rose-Marie’s bed. It had been cut down the middle with something—a knife? scissors? They don’t even allow residents to have such things in their rooms—and all her stuffing had been pulled out. The head and feet and hands were still connected by threads of fabric, but the doll was otherwise dismembered, disembowelled. There was something gluey in her hair and in her eyes that we couldn’t work out unless Rose-Marie had broken into the craft storeroom and stolen a bottle of PVA.

I tell this to Julia, who is correcting university papers and perhaps only partially paying attention. ‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘She was getting such joy from the doll.’

Julia, ever able to multi-task, does not look up from her papers. ‘Maybe she felt the baby was threatened,’ she says. ‘That happens, you know. When a mother animal feels her baby is threatened, she eats it sometimes. To protect it.’ She makes a mark with her red pen. ‘Cats,’ she says. ‘Mother cats will sometimes do it. Particularly if they’re inbred. Siamese cats, for instance.’

THE POEMS OF VEDA GRAY

One morning, not long before Mother’s book was due to be published, John Honey turned up on our doorstep. He looked exactly like his name: yellow hair, tanned face, brown corduroy jacket. ‘Veda,’ he said in a waxy voice. He had flowers and a gift-wrapped copy of her proofs.

Mother had let me stay home from school that day because I had hurt my leg in a crash on my bike. The front wheel of my bike was mangled beyond recovery; my ankle was twisted. It was all because of a dog running in front of me. I didn’t like dogs. I didn’t like Mother’s dog, Griffin, who salivated when you patted him and left everything he touched feeling damp. I was on the couch with my leg propped up on cushions, reading an abridged version of Moby Dick. I was struggling to understand how it was that Herman Melville could write so lovingly about whales, and yet so matter-of-factly about killing them. When they stripped the whale blubber off the dead whale, it went round and round like orange skin being peeled from an orange, and I wanted to be sick. It made me think of Paddy Cow. The whale babies were even called calves. Whale mothers had two teats in case they had twins, just like human women.

Mother made John Honey real coffee that filled the kitchen with a good rich smell. I could tell she was embarrassed, him arriving unawares like that, and her without any makeup on. Nobody visited her just on the off-chance.

Her conversation with John Honey, as she made the coffee, was stilted and boring. John Honey praised Mother, and Mother thanked John Honey. John Honey loosened his pale yellow tie and took off his brown cord jacket. Mother apologised about the state of the house. John complimented the coffee. Mother said she’d need something stronger than coffee pretty soon to get her through ‘this publishing malarkey.’ And they’d both laughed.