It wasn’t so bad at first. As sudden as Aunty Kaye’s death was, she didn’t really die straight away. Maybe people don’t. There was such a bustle about it all, everyone talking about her, saying what a wonderful person she was, that she seemed almost as alive as she’d ever been.

Gramps understood about honouring the dead. He always stopped and faced the road when a funeral cortège drove past, and he always held his hand to his chest and bowed his head to the mourners. So when he put a framed photograph of Aunty Kaye on the dining-room table, and lit a tea light in front of it every evening, that seemed the right and respectful thing to do. That I couldn’t bear to be in the room while the image flickered in the low light, and had to dash through with my hand masking it to reach the kitchen, seemed a childish silliness that I’d surely soon get over.

For a week after the accident, Gramps slept on a camp bed in my room. We both agreed the nightmares were normal enough, that they’d pass. But he would wake up when I did and fix us both a mug of hot milk. We’d chat quietly in my room during the small hours, or he’d reread yesterday’s Daily Mail while I carried on with my tattoo sketches, which would see her memory eternalized on my skin. When it started to get light outside, I’d usually be able to sleep again.

I actually enjoyed our shopping trip to get me a black suit and tie. I tried on a heap of them in the department store, settling for a slim-fitting mod cut with a square-ended wool tie. Gramps insisted I have whatever I wanted. Despite buying all his own clothes in charity shops, he didn’t baulk at the £300 price tag. ‘Kaye always looked great,’ he said to me as he peeled off the notes at the checkout. ‘You must look great for her.’

There was a suggestion of autumn in the air on that morning in late August when Gramps and I set off for Sussex. We both looked sharp and smelled great, our shoes gleaming after a half-hour of Gramps’s parade gloss treatment. We told stories about her the whole way there. I was sad for sure, but it was a warm sadness, the sort that everyone’s a part of. And it was weeks before I’d become petrified of being a passenger in a car, so I even enjoyed the journey, driven as ever at twenty below the speed limit.