When she hung up I said, “Isn’t it a hundred different kinds of not right that a real-life, living person would make a place worth less money instead of more? Don’t you think?” but Mum was still in high-drama, post-breakup crisis mode. She said, “I’ve got other things to think about, Jude, more immediate and pressing things, like finding a real place to live.” And I suppose I’ve got more immediate and pressing things to say now, and that’s part of the trouble, and why the value of a human life ends up having to wait for later.

Last Supper time in the flat, she pushed spaghetti hoops around on her plate instead of eating them, one of those new role-reversal moments that made me want to tell her to sit up properly and stop playing with her food.

“Don’t worry,” she said without commitment, kind of absent behind the eyes, like she had been for a while. “Everything’s going to be fine. Mr. Lake is a nice man on a nice street.”

“Yeah. So was Ted Bundy,” I said, and for a second I thought she might crack a smile, but she didn’t, just scowled, like I was trying to trick her into it.

She stood up to scrape the rest of her spaghetti hoops into the trash, the back of her head more expressive of her feelings than you’d think possible. Just a nudge and the whole lot slid off the plate in one slimy clump, a colony of something, half-reluctant, half-alive, which put me right off finishing mine. I watched her grip on the fork, waited for her knuckles to go from bone-light back to skin, and then I asked her again why a house was worth less money with another human being inside it, how that could ever be allowed to happen. On a good day, that might have been the start of a proper conversation about plutocracies and trickle-down economics and the politics of homeownership and the poverty gap, and I would have learned something. But we weren’t back to good days yet. No such luck.

“Oh, you know,” she said without turning round. “It’s the way of the world. People don’t like to share,” like that nailed it, like it was all that needed to be said.

“Is that it?” I said, and she said, “Pick your side, Jude. Is he a human being or an unhinged killer?”

“Or both,” I said, and she glared at me and the angry pulse in her jaw ticked.

“This is the last time, Mum. I’m not doing this with you again, I swear.”

“Fine with me,” she said on her way out of the room, but neither of us meant it, not really, and that was another one of our new-style low-quality splinter-family mealtimes over and done with.

FOUR