As soon as Mum finishes work, three days before Christmas Eve, we pack up the car and get out of the house as fast as we can. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to spend the holidays at home again, remembering where we used to have the tree, where we used to hang the lights around the windows, or the lights that hung from the front of the house to look like icicles. It’s too soon to think about, and Mum is as delicate as a snowflake as we put our cases in the boot in accustomed silence.

We manage one stilted exchange as we get in the car.

‘Will you be seeing him, Mr Walters, over Christmas?’

‘No, love. We’re taking a step back over the holidays.’

‘Oh.’

There are no boxes of presents amongst the carload of clothes and duvets. Any present shopping will have to be done in the next few days, from Nanna and Grandad’s house.

It doesn’t take long before Mum turns off the constant stream of Christmas songs on the radio. It was always Dad who would sing along, Mum hating it at first, visibly cringing at every ‘merry and bright’ and each mention of Santa Claus. But eventually, Dad would win her round with his appalling singing voice and sheer enthusiasm. He’d have carols on in the house all the time for the week leading up to Christmas and he’d go through this big charade of putting presents under the tree one by one, pretending to tip-toe into the lounge to place them there while Mum and I were watching TV, and then making a big show of being surprised to find them, like he expected us to believe that some kind, benevolent force had brought them, or that they’d magically appeared as a result of the festive spirit.

Mum and I shared a kind of cynical conspiracy against him, pretending together to ignore what he was doing: the label on the biggest carrot that read ‘save this for Rudolf’, the way he’d leave pictures around the house that he’d printed from the internet – pictures of watches, suits, expensive road bikes, cars – the words ‘maybe this year?’ were written on all of them.