Next came sixteen-year-old Bernard. ‘I love ya, Ma,’ he said. Bernard was a sports nut who lived on the pitch and loved his mammy loudly and proudly. If he noticed the other kids laughing at him it didn’t bother him. Bernard was what his granny Molly called a dote.

‘I know you do, son. I love you too,’ she said.

Fourteen-year-old Ryan stood behind his brother; he didn’t hug his mother, he just took in her appearance. ‘You look like shite, Ma.’ He wasn’t being cruel, he was calling it like it was. Ryan was Grace’s problem child, in that he had a leanings towards criminality. He’d robbed his school friends’ mobile phones, sold them to a Chinese-run phone shop in a backstreet alley in town. He took the money he’d made and played on the stock market. The kid turned out to be a financial genius, so when he was eventually caught he could afford to pay all the kids back enough money for new mobile phones and made an apology tour around the school, using his auntie Rabbit’s cancer as a reason for his errant behaviour. The little bollocks. He got away with it, but Grace was watching him like a hawk.

‘I can run you a bath?’ he asked, but she shook her head.

‘No thanks, son. I’m so tired I think I’d drown.’

Lenny disappeared into the kitchen. She could hear him boiling the kettle and cooking up a storm.

‘Was she scared, Ma?’ Bernard asked.

‘No, love.’

‘How do ya know?’ Ryan said.

‘I just do.’

Nine-year-old Jeff, Grace’s youngest son, was sitting on the stairs, wearing a way too snug-fitting tracksuit.

Grace sat down beside him. ‘You all right, son?’

‘I should have said goodbye,’ he said. He was referring to the night all the kids had lined up to say goodbye to a semi-comatose Rabbit. Jeffrey was so freaked he’d bottled it.

‘You were there, and that’s enough.’

‘I’m a baby,’ he said.

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Ryan says I am.’

‘Ryan, don’t call your brother a baby.’

‘For the record I called him a fat, crying Buddha baby,’ Ryan said, and Grace was too exhausted to fight him.

‘Don’t mind him, Jeff, you’re doing great.’

‘I’ve lost four pounds, Ma,’ Jeffrey said.

‘I’m proud of you, son.’

When the doctor described her youngest son as obese and pre-diabetic it had been a massive shock. How did she let that happen? And pre-diabetic? The child hadn’t even made it to double digits. She’d hated herself. I did this and I will undo it. Jeffrey’s life changed that day, and since then he’d been exercising, drinking water, living on greens and hating every second of it but trying his absolute best, mostly because of an abject fear of losing his legs. Grace wasn’t a subtle woman.