‘There’s something my father used to say,’ Gramps went on. ‘He was a big reader, my dad. I think it was that Robert Louis Stevenson chap who first said it.’ He held my shoulder as he fought to remember the line. ‘“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.”’ He repeated it. ‘Wise words, lad. Wise words right there.’

There began the cheerful phase. We always smiled at each other. We always said good morning and goodnight, even if some days there was little said in between. I’d lie about my day over dinner, tell him that the friends he asked after were doing fine, even though I had no clue if they were or not.

I didn’t tell him what happened on Bonfire Night a week later. It was, after all, just nerves. It would pass. Bothering him with it would only have upset the quiet content that had settled over our house. If he wondered why I spent two hours locked in the toilet, he didn’t let on.

They weren’t memories. Memories are photographs seen at a distance; they are grainy video footage. They are unreliable missing details, which our imagination is free to replace. They are the past. These were memories that had clawed themselves into the present.

I was upstairs taking a pee when the firework display in the park began. The frosted window above the cistern flashed yellow. Half a second later came the boom. My brain shook from one side of my skull to the other. My vision turned to red. Then black. And then I was back looking at the toilet, my piss running down the wall and my trouser leg. My heartbeat hammered at my neck.

What the fuck?

Another flash, another bang. I slammed back into the wall, the slab front of a Range Rover racing towards my face. I dropped into the gap between the toilet and the wall with my trousers around my knees. I covered my head.

I never remembered Aunty Kaye’s staccato screech of the word Fuck. But I heard it now, and I knew that it had happened. The stench of petrol filled the little room. My eyes streamed from the vapour. I gulped at the air.

A machine-gun rattle of explosions erupted from the park. I was wrenched round in a circle. I saw my limbs fling out from me like I’d been wound in a massive rubber band then released. But my hands never left my soaking scalp.

A moment of calm. I was still pissing. On the floor, on to my legs. I tried to stand. The iron smell of blood hit the back of my throat. My head whipped round. Aunty Kaye’s obliterated face was centimetres from mine. Then it was gone. Another bang and she was back, even closer. Then the ozone smell of rain on hot tarmac. The sound of sirens.