Aunty Kaye visited her almost as often as I did, and she’d always be straight with me about it. Like me, she understood the cycle of Mum flitting between stays in hospital and living independently in what people call a halfway house. Sure, she was out of hospital now, but we’d been here enough times to know it was unlikely to last. It was great to talk to Aunty Kaye about it, to be treated like an adult. I hadn’t lived with Mum since I was four years old, and it seemed to be only Aunty Kaye and me who appreciated how that was unlikely to change any time soon.

‘I’m not trying to be negative,’ she told me. ‘I’m not a psychiatrist. Who knows what breakthroughs might be on the horizon?’

‘You do deal with brains, though.’

‘Neurology’s my area. It’s not the same thing. I do hardware; psychiatrists do software. And the software is very complicated indeed.’

We both laughed at the analogy.

‘You know I can’t really talk to Gramps about this stuff,’ I told her.

She rolled her eyes. ‘He won’t talk to anyone about it, Ollie. It’s like it’s a source of personal embarrassment for him.’

‘What’s that all about?’

She gave an exasperated shrug. ‘If I was being generous, I’d say it’s just a generational thing.’

‘And if you weren’t being generous?’

She laughed. ‘I might call it ignorance – just between you and me. Christ, Ollie, it’s like he thinks she’s putting the whole thing on. He just can’t get his head round it. I imagine he thinks mental illness doesn’t even really exist. That it’s just a byword for weakness of character.’

‘Because it’s in her head, he thinks it’s all in her head?’

‘Perfectly put, young man. That is the Gramps position right there!’ She held her palms aloft. ‘What can you do?’

I tried to settle our bill with the wad of notes Gramps had given me, but Aunty Kaye wouldn’t have it. ‘Easy come, easy go,’ she said – a catchphrase of hers on the subject of money – tossing a bank card on to the table, together with a twenty-quid tip.

‘You’ll be in your element where we’re heading now,’ she said as we walked towards the seafront in the slow saunter of the overfed. It was gone eleven and the town had come alive again after a brief intermission mid-evening. As we descended the steps separating Madeira Drive from the beach, Aunty Kaye swayed and clutched at the handrail, conceding that the second bottle of rice wine may have been an error. I’d stuck to mineral water throughout dinner.