We had a few photos of her, but they didn’t seem to conjure her up anything like as powerfully as the sense of her I had in my own mind. Mum always said I had an overactive imagination, but this wasn’t something I was making up: she was just there, and from time to time I knew it.

When I was younger I’d assumed that Mum could feel the golden glow that was Grandma in just the same way that I could, and that Ava could as well, but was too haughty to talk about it. But then, in the months since Mum had started seeing Mark and everything had started shifting in ways I didn’t fully understand, it had occurred to me that maybe Mum felt more cut off from Grandma than I did. That maybe her Grandma was more like photos, a mixture of pictures of the past that were sometimes faded or black and white. This made me feel very sorry for her, because there was something so warm about Grandma and I liked to turn to her when I felt sad. Not in a having-a-conversation kind of way, or even a huggy way – you can’t hug or chat to a golden glow, you just have to bask in it.

So I carried on not saying anything about Grandma to Mum. If she didn’t have the same thing, it would have sounded weird and she might not have believed me. And if she had believed me it might have sounded like boasting, like I was making out I had some kind of special access. Or it could have scared her, as if I was some kind of spooky little kid out of a horror film.

I didn’t say anything about the bad stuff I picked up from time to time because the bad stuff was too frightening to talk about and anyway, I couldn’t be sure whether it had happened already, or was maybe going to happen, or even who it had happened to or would happen to.

Most of the time, the way the bad stuff came in was just a vague, ominous feeling – like the way the light changes when it’s about to rain, and the air smells different. A waiting sort of feeling. I’d had those bad-weather feelings a few times that year. I didn’t know if that was because I was getting older or because more of the kind of events that prompted them were happening around me. They didn’t always come to anything – or maybe it was just that I didn’t always get to find out whether they were right or not. I didn’t ignore them, exactly, but also, there never seemed to be a lot I could do about them.

One of the nurses who lived upstairs had gone out one evening wearing a bright red shirt, and something about that red shirt had freaked me out and I’d known something bad was coming and then I’d found out a few weeks later that she’d been stabbed on her way home, and had left nursing and London and gone back to her family in Derbyshire.