Ben followed him. Ron said, ‘Stop hovering, boy. You want to carry me down? Be my guest! And then you can do your grandmother!’

‘Oh, don’t be so stupid!’ Norma wailed.

‘I have plans to move in here permanently,’ Ron announced, ‘so the sooner the electric chair is done the better.’

Ron leant passively against Ben, waiting to be picked up. Ben froze. He had been distracted by other things, but now he grasped the new reality. His mum and Lou would leave him in The Lodge with his crazy father, his crazier uncle and his craziest of all grandfather. As the ‘bearer’, among other things. All his preoccupations fell away. Ben saw the future as an adult must see it, not as a series of events but as an unbroken plain stretching to vanishing point.

‘Wait, what? Grandma?’

‘What is it, darling?’ Norma said, edging to the top of the steep flight of stairs.

‘There was something Uncle Carl said to me.’

‘Well, I don’t know if you can believe what comes out of your uncle’s mouth,’ Norma said, ruffling his hair with her free hand, then returning it nervously to her walking stick.

‘Useful as a hip pocket on a singlet,’ Ron said. ‘Are we going?’ ‘It’s been bothering me, something he said about him not being my only uncle …’ Ben stopped.

‘Chop-chop,’ Ron said. But Norma, reading Ben’s face, was ahead of his words. Her eyelids and mouth began to pucker as if sucked inwards by a vacuum sealer.

‘Sorry, forget I said anything,’ Ben said.

He looked down the stairs for his mother. He felt very alone.

Norma’s stick clattered on the landing. Her hands went to her face. It sounded like her fingers had voices, and they were all moaning. Ben put his arms around her.

‘Look what you’ve done to your grandmother,’ Ron said. ‘Come on, are you going to carry me or not? Big strong boy like you?’

If Ben could have any wish granted, it would have been the power to grab his words out of Grandma’s ears and stuff them back into his mouth.

Grandma’s hands had come away from her face and now held Ben’s. Her eyes were inside him. Ben didn’t do eyes. They scared him. Of the three hundred and sixty points of the compass, the one Ben could never look at was the one occupied by Grandma’s eyes, which were more blood than eye. More yellow than white. More white milk inside the gold than the gold. Ben was afraid of getting lost in that blood, that milk. He pulled himself out of her, pushed her out of him. He understood something about his father. If he loved Grandma, he had to lie.

‘I’m—I’m sorry, Grandma. I was just doing a family tree project at school and I …’