If only she had a mobile phone, she would at least have seen the message with her own eyes. It might make no practical difference, but she wouldn’t have this terrible sense of having been wrong-footed. Of being so negligent that dozens of people – by the sound of it – were aware of her own son’s despair before she knew the first thing about it. She’d just never got used to them. She was the wrong generation. Lee had a mobile, and the few times she’d tried to type out a message on it, it had taken so long that she might as well – like her father – be popping a letter in the post. It was the same with all of it. Her Facebook page, set up by James, had gone unmonitored for months; it was too much, the way it kept telling you about new features, and she hadn’t really recovered from the laughter of her children when she asked how to ‘befriend’ people on the site. Emails, Jean tried her best with, but she’d always found typing laborious: her fingers just wouldn’t fall into the right patterns, it was like trying to play the piano. Talking was so much easier. People just didn’t seem to be so keen on that, these days.

The kettle had boiled, and Jean looked blankly at it. It was one of these new ones with a transparent body, so you could watch the water – under a blue light – frothing and bubbling right up to the second it clicked. It was no better at the actual job than the shrieking kettle she’d had for years, before Alan died. But Sal had said that was ‘on its last legs’ and that this one had the best reviews.

Jean flipped the top of the Kilner jar, got a teabag out, tossed it into the mug. Milk came last, no matter what anyone said. She rubbed her eyes. She didn’t even want the tea, not really. Of course not.

She saw James as he had been at twelve, a chubby, polite boy in a smart grey jumper, off to Edinburgh with his father. With Alan, her soulmate. She experienced a quick and lacerating sense of loss for those days, of the time when they were a family. It wasn’t fair to Lee to think like that. It didn’t do any good, either. But this again was not really thinking, it was just feeling; it came from lower than the brain, from somewhere not so easily located. And the loss became a longing, to know where James was, to know what to do to help him.