‘Okay, have to get you ready for something,’ Faye says. ‘A thing you need to know. Better to show you than tell you.’ She pauses, as if she might have got it wrong, and a way of telling us might occur to her after all. She glances up the stairs, and nods. ‘You know Simon, your brother Simon. Well, I don’t think you know Simone yet.’

A woman appears on the stairs, her feet first, in red sandals, then the hem of a white robe, trimmed with gold lace. She has a red ribbon around her waist. Her left hand is on the balustrade for balance. The skin of her arm is an even cream colour, no flaws, no blemishes, like a mannequin, a doll. Her left shoulder is bare. She has wild auburn hair, with a red ribbon and vine leaves in it. Her face is just beginning to smile, and stays that way, a smile beginning. She moves as if she is hovering, not quite real. As if she has been invented to be observed, or has come from another time.

Lacy says, ‘Oh.’

‘It’s me,’ the woman on the stairs says, in a voice that is almost Simon’s, Simon’s but muffled. She looks at me, wide-eyed, her entire blue-grey irises showing. ‘I’m Simone now.’

Faye is her normal self, still – her regular self, as Simone moves to stand near her, on the second-bottom step. She takes Simone’s right hand. Faye has blemishes on her arms, fine wrinkles on her face. She has aged, as we all do. She is watching me, checking me. Simon’s voice is gone, as if it wasn’t there, an act of ventriloquism I’ve imagined, a sound that only happened in my head.

‘I told you in an email I was having to face up to some things,’ his voice says.

Simone moves to the foot of the stairs, squarely facing me, presenting herself to me, the pupils in her vivid irises blinking and shuttering. Simon, Simone. My brother, not my brother. Not a costume, not a game, not a figure from mythology in her robe and vine leaves and ribbons, watching, waiting. Gripping Faye’s hand. Breath rasping through the mask, through the aperture in that fixed beginning smile.

‘Okay,’ I tell him. ‘Okay,’ I tell Simon’s voice. Simone. ‘Well, this is a thing all right.’ I let myself breathe. ‘And there I was thinking you meant being an old bastard whose coronary arteries were shot. That’s what you were facing up to.’

A laugh wheezes from the mouth of the mask. ‘That too.’

‘But, you know, kudos for the unexpected twist.’

He laughs again. He’s in there, somewhere. Or maybe he isn’t, and Simone is laughing. Laughing with me.

‘It’s cool,’ Lacy says. ‘We’re cool, right?’ She nudges me. ‘You’re cool?’