I wanted to spill all the fucking tea, tell Caro everything, like the child she had called me, desperate to confess bad behaviour. Ask her advice on what Géricault had said at the press conference. Ask why they were suggesting I’d hurt my baby when all I’d wanted was her to be safe. But despite how pissed I was at that moment, I knew telling Caro too much was a one-way ticket to the slammer. So I kept schtum.

‘We all feel love, so we all feel pain,’ she said.

‘No, I don’t. Not until now.’

‘Of course you do,’ she said again. ‘You love your baby. I love all my children, despite what shits they became. If any one of them needed me in their lives, I would step off this ship in a heartbeat. I would stop the world.’

‘Would you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I dunno if I experience love the way everyone else does. The brain injury I got – my sister said it smashed all the love out of me. I don’t deserve love.’

‘Of course you do. Maybe your sister underestimated you?’ Caro suggested. ‘Maybe love has smashed all the hate out of you?’

What, like a reverse Breaking Bad? Was I breaking good? A tear rolled down, landing in my glass with a plink.

Caro sat back, glass rested against her necklaces. ‘There’s love, right there. Hurts, doesn’t it? It’s the greatest feeling we were given the capacity for but it’s also the most painful. I think I would rather experience it than not.’

I drank and drank until the angry flame for Ivy dulled and went out. I drank until I was happy and laughing about every single little stupid thing. I didn’t care if the entire Spanish police force marched in and loaded me into a straitjacket and a Hannibal mask.

Old Moneybags paid our bar bill, thank God, and I wheeled her chair outside where the sun was still beating down and the day wasn’t done with us. ‘Do you want to have a mooch round the square before the ship leaves?’

‘Oh no thanks,’ she said. ‘I need another church like I need another tumour in my tits.’ And we were laughing again. ‘I’m hungry,’ she announced. ‘Let’s go and find something stodgy to mop up all this booze.’

The rest of the afternoon, we wandered about the old town laughing at hats on souvenir stalls, eating churros and free samples of roasted snail, tapas and Spanish sausage. I couldn’t be arsed to be Hilary so I let the act slip and went a little more Rhiannon. There was something about Caro which made me feel like I could be more myself – to a point, anyway. After lunch we flagged down a cab large enough to accommodate Caro’s wheelchair and went to Jardin Botanico – the botanical gardens.