‘Jules the Viking is going to be at Lily’s and I said I’d pop by after dinner,’ says Maisie. ‘I hope that’s OK? Your lot’ll be on to the crap jokes and beer pong by then.’

‘Be back before eleven.’ Becky begins peeling, awkwardly navigating the potato skins with her kitchen-towel-bandaged finger. ‘What is he, exactly?’

‘What do you mean? Like, is he a werewolf? What are you asking?’ She is smiling, messing with her mum. ‘Relax. He’s my friend.’ Maisie is in a bouncy mood, full of questions tonight, and just when Becky is hoping for some quiet. ‘When you and Dad dated …’ Maisie begins again.

‘We never dated. We just liked each other for a bit.’

‘Enough to have me. So obviously it was meant to be on some level, you lucky people.’

‘What did you want to ask me?’

‘So Jules called me his Viking Queen yesterday. What do you think that means?’

‘It means he believes you are royalty and also that you are a member of a sea-faring race of warriors from—’

‘Don’t even try to be more annoying than me. Be serious.’

Becky can hear the girlish insecurity in Maisie’s voice, the need to know what this boy is thinking about her. She almost regrets teasing her: what if Maisie stops talking to her? Then how will she keep her safe? But Becky also thinks that Jules sounds bombastic and full of machismo, the kind of boy who is looking to get his rocks off at Glastonbury in an expensive tent bought for the occasion by his parents, who have positively encouraged he go, seeing it as a passport to adventure. All the while, Jules is probably planning how to get the pills and dreaming of deflowering someone like Maisie, perhaps Maisie herself, on the built-in groundsheet floor of his expensive tent.

She wants to tell her daughter that, whatever it is Jules means by his comment, she is without doubt so much better than this probably disappointing teen lothario, who is busy hiding a galaxy of insecurities behind his new leather jacket and his long hair and his loud voice.

‘If he’s teasing you? If he’s giving you nicknames? It means he’s thinking about you.’

‘Did you and Dad have nicknames for each other?’

‘I called him my Viking King, as it so happens.’

‘Mum!’

‘Sorry. Um, I don’t know, really. I’ve forgotten so much from back then already. I think I always called him Adam. He didn’t, I don’t know, he didn’t project a need for nicknaming. Does that make sense? Like, some people end up with ten nicknames given to them by ten different people. But others just get their birth name.’

Maisie has lost interest. There is something else she needs to press on her mother.