His back was turned to her, still watching the space where Beccie had merged into the wall, and finally she reached him, feeling for mirror or brick where there should be a human body – but there was nothing. She touched, and she swore she felt something as her fingers pushed through the shape, which turned.

‘Don’t let her in, love.’

It was not Vincent who spoke.

‘Mom! What the… Why are you here?’

As if in answer, her thigh vibrated with an electrifying shock, a thousand trapped insects in her pocket.

Petra pulled the phone out of her pocket and watched the missed message scrolling up on her screen. An unlisted number.

Text message: <Petra Orff, please call us urgently. Clarendon Hospital.>

‘Oh, darling. I’m out of time. Don’t let her in. Go home now, otherwise she’ll stay in your head. Please go home, love.’

But Petra was not listening. ‘Mom?’ Her mind had stopped working – blanked or overloaded. ‘Is that you? How can it be you?’

‘Get out.’ Olivia was in the room and touched Helena on the temple. Her fingers didn’t go through her – they fused, and a greenish light flowed from her and through her mother, and Helena slumped forward, deanimated, before dissolving graphically in front of her daughter.

Mom, I don’t know where home is.

26

26 There were about forty people at Helena’s memorial service, at the undertakers next to a kitchen out-fitters in a light-industrial estate in Sydenham. They were people who introduced themselves as members of the arts trust and the soup kitchen and the community garden, parts of Helena’s life that had only ever been abstract lines in her weekly report, not real living people who would bother to put on suits and skirts and come to this tawdry funeral shop and cry and smile and squeeze the arm of a daughter they had never met. It felt shaming, wrong and deeply comforting all at once to see her mother mourned by these clusters of complete strangers. Suki was the only person there who she knew.

Apart from Gloria. Somehow she’d found out the time and the venue. She’d only been there a minute, standing at the wall by the exit, talking to a woman with short grey hair and a chestful of chunky beads. She caught Petra’s eye and came across to where she was standing alone in the middle of the room, burning her fingers on a saucerless teacup whose handle was too small to get her finger into.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she said, gripping Petra’s forearm. ‘Vincent should have come.’

‘How is he?’

‘He’s fine.’

‘So he made it home alright?’

Gloria nodded.

‘I’m glad to hear that. I went there, you know. I found him. I told him you were worried.’

‘I know. Thank you.’