‘I’ll strip the paper and prep the walls for painting. Have you decided what colour you want?’

‘White, I think it’ll freshen it up. Dad painted this room dark green once. With all his plants in here, it was like a forest indoors – I loved it, but it was very oppressive. Trouble was the cracks in the walls started to show through, so Mum made him paper it over.’

He pulled at a torn strip of cream paper exposing the green paint. ‘That’s going to be a bugger to paint over if you have white walls.’

‘I wrote my name and the date somewhere,’ she said, tearing at the paper with a ferocity that surprised him.

‘Here it is,’ she said, breathless. She stood back and unveiled the scribble in black pen: ‘Maddy Dunn 22 July 1997’. ‘I was fourteen.’ She stared at it, entranced. ‘The following year Dad died and I finished school.’

‘Was he ill?’

‘No, nothing like that.’ She looked away.

He wasn’t going to push her if she didn’t want to talk about it. He continued stripping the paper around Maddy’s name.

‘It was probably the last time I was really happy.’

He stopped what he was doing. ‘That’s a sad thing to say.’

‘It’s true. Until now, that is,’ she turned to him, beaming.

He winked at her and finished his drink. Perhaps he should tell her what really happened to his bastard parents, how they ran off to Canada in the middle of the night, leaving him with Gran in a pokey old flat and the rent overdue. Gran’s voice was forever carved in his memory: Well I never – gone without so much as a cheerio! It did make him smile in a sick sort of way. Married too young, Gran decided. They wrote to him once. Promised to come back for him, but they never did. Joined some sort of cult or commune. Said they’d all be together again once they’d set up their new life. His guts twisted just thinking about how fucking selfish two people could be. As the years went by he gave up hope of ever seeing them again. It became easier to think of them as dead. Gran always said, they weren’t the people we thought they were. She was the only one who ever cared about him. Nursing her until her last breath was the least he could do. Aged fifteen and all alone. Nice way to start out in life. Thanks for nothing, Mum and Dad. Shame you’re not worth a second thought.

They’d almost finished stripping the second wall when chips of plaster began to fall away with each strip, revealing deeper cracks.

‘Bugger. I’ll have to dig out all the loose pieces and fill the holes before I can do any painting,’ he told her. ‘It’s going to take twice as long as I thought.’