‘Well, now you all know what it feels like to be cheated on. Not so nice when it happens to you, is it?’ Our mother’s tissue paper Christmas hat had tipped across her forehead like a witch’s fringe. ‘We’ve had every sort of failure in our family. Alcoholics, adulterers, homosexuals, gamblers. But, in truth, you’re all the most bitter disappointments.’ She rose up like a cobra ready to strike, hissing through clenched teeth. ‘When I finally die – of shame, no doubt, after today – I’m bequeathing a little legacy to each of the grandchildren, but the rest I’m leaving to the church, the only part of my life that has never let me down,’ she said, with all the melodrama of a Dickensian denouement.

I took a deep, shaky breath and marshalled all of my energy for a final desperate surge, like a drowning surfer paddling for the wave that will rescue them from the rip and get them safely to shore. ‘I’ve never wanted to admit it to myself, Mum,’ I said, with surprising tranquillity, ‘but you really do hate us, don’t you? Why?’

Our mother’s cheeks sucked in to make valleys in her face, and her eyes glinted like metal. ‘Your father was the most feckless, irresponsible, selfish man on god’s earth. And you girls worshipped him. Even when I’d discover another of his sordid little affairs, you’d always take his side. You even covered up for him! I just hope he’s writhing in his gruesome grave,’ she said venomously.

The Ryan girls looked at our mother with pained astonishment.

‘Wow, Mum,’ I finally said. ‘You’d be discharged from a Saudi hit squad for being too brutal, do you know that?’

Ruth’s false nails, which were sharp enough to disembowel an echidna, raked a scratch down my arm. As an imaginative child, I’d taken more beatings from mum’s feather duster than my sisters for telling tall tales. ‘I’ve told you a million times, do not exaggerate!’ Ruth would yell while whacking away at my legs. The pain of the scratch was the catalyst I needed.

‘I don’t know why Dad married you, but I’d be very surprised if it didn’t involve some kind of satanic ritual at some point.’

Ruth fluttered her bejewelled fingers in the air, shooing away the conversation as if it were a mosquito. ‘What better way to hurt him, than to hurt all of you!’ Her voice was firm and punitive – the kind of voice that God would have used to part the Red Sea. ‘At least your father confirmed my Catholic faith. Yes. He taught me that there really is an afterlife; I finally had a life after he died.’