She had slept with her best friend’s brother while married to Neil. They ended up together in her marital bed when he was home two years previously on holiday. They had a long and complicated history. She lost her virginity to Davey Hayes; she’d loved him since they were both kids. It was never going to go anywhere. If she hadn’t been so unhappy with her husband she wouldn’t have risked her marriage, but she did and he caught her, threw her out and now she lived alone in a rented apartment. Davey apologised for blowing up her life before he skipped back to America to live out his ridiculous touring rock and roll life. She forgave him, not just because he was Rabbit’s brother but because it was Davey. The Hayeses were her family and Molly Hayes the mother she’d never had. She would always forgive Davey.

‘And that bloody fool doesn’t want you – tainted goods,’ Vera said, before following up with a pious, ‘You reap what you sow.’

‘Who are you to judge me?’ Marjorie asked.

‘I’m your mother.’

‘You’re a cold-hearted bitch whose vagina I was unlucky enough to slide out of.’ After years of her mother’s taunts Marjorie had snapped and screamed the insult. It was the first time she’d said anything remotely like that to her mother, but Rabbit was dying and she was angry and hurt.

‘If only you had slid out, Marjorie, my life would have been very, very different,’ Vera said, and hung up. Marjorie had been a difficult birth and Vera’s arduous labour had ended in a symphysiotomy, a barbaric method of cutting a child out of a woman’s vagina that left Vera Shaw with lifelong pain and discomfort. If it didn’t drive her husband away, it certainly contributed to his leaving. After years of living a lie, five days’ working abroad and weekends locked in his bedroom at home, Marjorie’s father admitted he had another family in the UK, two boys and a girl. He left that night. Marjorie was sixteen. Her mother never mentioned her father’s name again and Marjorie never sought him or his offspring out. Her relationship with her cold, bitter, angry mother had been trying from the start. I must be insane. She stood up and brushed herself down, and as she hailed a taxi she could have sworn she saw her mother’s lace curtain twitch.

In her apartment, she melted into a bath and vacated her own mind for a while, lying still in warm water before holding her breath and sliding under. Rabbit, are you there?

I’m here.

I miss you already.

Well if you don’t breathe in the next few seconds you won’t be missing me for long.