‘I will be very happy here,’ Mum says and as I help her out of her wheelchair, I believe her.

Kerry and I tried to talk her into hospice at home, but she said she wanted to be out of the way, so you can still start your foundation training without having to nurse me too.

It’s true that, timewise, this is the perfect storm. In twenty-four days, it’ll be Black Wednesday, the day junior doctors start their very first job in a grotesque game of paged musical bleeps. I will be one of them.

‘I’ll unpack for you, Elaine, tell me where you want me to put everything.’ Kerry unzips the suitcase. The hospice sent a list of what to bring, as though Mum was coming on holiday, albeit a holiday where you spend most of your time in pyjamas. The giant paper bag of pills sits on top, but underneath there are books and Kerry’s iPod, loaded with Mum’s Beatles and Bay City Rollers tracks.

‘Where shall we put this?’

Kerry holds up my mother’s favourite photograph, of me and Kerry as children, in our St John uniforms, gripping our gold and silver medals.

Mum smiles at the picture. The steroids have meant that from certain angles, her face has a healthy plumpness, so at times she looks better than when she only had lupus. Her spindly body tells a different story. ‘Next to me on my bedside table, please!’

I shift her empty suitcase into the bottom of the wardrobe and have a premonition of bringing it home again, much lighter without the meds that are maintaining her fragile grip on life.

At first, it’s unfamiliar, the stinging behind my eyes. But now I recognize it. Tears. I am not, have never been, a crier, not even when Dad left.

‘I could smell baking when I came in,’ I say, forcing myself to turn towards Mum and Kerry in the knowledge that I can’t cry, not in front of them. ‘What do you think it is?’

The emotional danger passes, as we speculate: carrot or chocolate cake or Victoria sponge?

‘It’s not a sponge,’ Mum corrects me, ‘it’s a Victoria sandwich. Don’t they teach you the important stuff at medical school?’

She jokes now, sometimes. I don’t remember her doing that before.

The nurse arrives to check on the medications and talk through Mum’s routine. Kerry and I head for the garden and she links arms with me.

When we first got close again, I worried she was acting for my mother’s sake, but now it feels natural. We’ve even started making love again, and it happens even more often than when we first got together as teenagers. Kerry isn’t pretending.

The closeness has created a positive feedback loop: the more we are together, the better it feels. Oxytocin, maybe.

‘I’ve been thinking . . .’ Kerry says.