Psychotherapeutic jargon tried to crowd my tongue – to achieve closure, death’s and the mind’s door closing in synchrony, was that what I wanted? But the feeling I had now was too visceral to be manoeuvred with mere words; there was too much pain here, sharp blades of it sliding against my bones. I was afraid that I was going to cry.

Angela nodded. She sat with her bulk spreading across a sofa, her hands laced across her front. ‘You were a funny girl,’ she said.

I was surprised by my entry from the wings because I had been waiting for the spotlight to shine on Ted.

‘You always seemed to be listening. Eavesdropping, was that it? Trying to get in on the fun?’

I thought back. Fun was more than I looked for. What I wanted was not to be excluded. Abandonment was what I feared most, not surprisingly. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s it, in a way.’

Angela said, ‘I don’t know what I can tell you, dear. Your father was just a boyfriend to me, you know. Older than anyone else I’d been with, a bit suave with his car and the scent and so on. He was lovely like I said, I always thought he was dead gorgeous. But wicked as well. Wicked in his ways with women, if you know what I mean, not because of what else he did. I never minded about that, it wasn’t much anyway and I’d have waited for him longer than the six months or whatever it was. But he didn’t want me when he came out. A clean break was what he was after. And then I met Michael and that was that.’

I was listening not just with my head now but with the whole surface of my skin, my new thinner skin. The drowsiness had gone and I sat upright, trying to sort meaning from the tangle of Angela’s words.

‘I remember you so well, back then. Fifteen, you were and your eyes big enough to see everything that went on but as innocent as a kid of eight. That was Ted’s way with you. He didn’t want you touched by all that.’

Apprehensiveness was gathering, crawling like nausea in my chest. ‘All what?’

‘What are you asking me?’ Angela blinked, her eyelids like pale crescents of dough.

I spoke carefully. ‘I don’t know anything about this. What do you mean about not minding what he did, and waiting for him to come out, and my father not wanting me to be touched by it?’

A car had drawn up outside the bungalow opposite and a woman was lifting supermarket bags out of the boot. Angela’s head had turned but I didn’t think she was watching her neighbour. She was just working out the extent of my ignorance. ‘You really don’t know, do you?’ she asked at last.

‘No.’