Lizzie knows when she’s beaten. She thanks Tess quietly, lowers her head and forces down a lump of indistinguishable vegetable. Lenny is too happy to protest the bit about the bath. He’s already waiting at the back door, doing keepie-uppies with the ball.

Once Lenny and Tess have gone, Lizzie scrapes her plate and makes her way upstairs. She’d love to bathe with Lenny, like she used to, but her body is a map of scars that he cannot see. She counts them as she soaks herself in water not quite warm enough to be relaxing and jumps out when she hears him bound up the stairs, quickly wrapping herself in her dressing-gown. It’s cheap, the itchy nylon sticking to her damp flesh. She had a towelling one at home. Penance.

‘Come on, Lenny, hop in,’ she says, topping up the bath with the last of the hot water.

‘Tess is all right in goal,’ Lenny says, as he pulls his jumper over his head. ‘She even saved a couple.’ He pulls down his trousers and pants at the same time and would have got into the bath with his socks on if Lizzie hadn’t stopped him.

She kneels by the bath and makes him a long beard with the bubbles. ‘They are always round because of surface tension. Their shell is made from a layer of water between two layers of soap. Bubbles can be frozen, just like water. Snapping shrimp kill their prey with bubbles.’

‘Never.’

‘True fact.’

‘Cool.’ Lenny pretends to kill her with his pincers and, after some persuasion, lets her wash his hair.

He falls asleep halfway through ‘Jabberwocky’. She doesn’t sleep, though. Instead she opens the curtains slightly, so the light from the brillig moon shines on her son and her slithy toves, as she watches him breathe in, and out, and in again.

George

(George lays it out on the table)

‘MORNING, POPPY! HOW ARE you today?’

‘She’s hardly going to answer you, is she, daft mare?’

‘Dogs have their own way of communicating. You just have to be able to understand them,’ Betty says, bending down to kiss the fur between Poppy’s eyes.

‘I don’t want to own a dog, let alone understand the poxy thing. What next? Tea leaves and Tarot cards?’

‘I thought I’d run the vacuum round first.’ Betty stands up painfully slowly and says, ‘Takes a while for my psychic abilities to kick in. And don’t say those things about Poppy. She understands more than you think.’

‘She’s as bad at taking a hint as you are,’ George says, briefly wondering if Betty has a walking stick, then deciding he doesn’t care. He made Ellen a fine pikestaff with a smart brass cap that tapped like a hobnail boot. Far too good for Betty: she’d only bend it.