‘Faith, do you think Jordan doesn’t love me any more?’

‘Gracie, shh. Listen, I want you to drink some water and get some sleep. Okay? I’ll phone you in the morning.’

The room spins. I will sit here until it stops. Oh God, please make the room stop spinning.

‘Okay. But, Faith, I don’t want to do the new show. Eat Me. Pfffft. It’s so contrived. And it’s sexy. It probably isn’t even a cookery show. And it’s… it’s… what do we think it is again?’

‘We think it’s time for bed, darling. Goodnight.’

The next morning, too little sleep, too much booze the night before, the landline rings. From bed, I clutch the landline receiver from the side table.

‘Hello?’ My voice is a barely-there rasp. I remember smoking cigarettes last night. I only ever smoke when I’m exceedingly sloshed.

‘Grace, dear?’ It’s my mother. ‘What’s wrong with your voice? Are you unwell?’

‘Of sorts.’ I splutter into the mouthpiece, burning with the shame only a doting parent can inflict on a fully independent thirty-three-year-old. ‘I’m hung-over.’

My mother was forty-seven when I was conceived. Before I came along, my parents had long ago given up hoping for a child. For the first five months of her geriatric pregnancy, my mother assumed I was the menopause. Now, my parents are old. My mother is eighty. My father is eighty-six. Luckily, they’re both in rude physical health, walking eight miles daily between them, and have a social life I sometimes envy. There isn’t pressure for me to look after them yet, which is a relief. That said, my mother is prone to fussing. And my father, I suspect, is becoming senile – my mother insists it’s selective memory that suits him just fine and I’m not to worry a dot.

‘You were out on a Tuesday evening, dear? On a school night?’

My mother was an English teacher before I was born, my father an air-conditioner engineer with the NHS until he retired. Now, she volunteers at a charity shop and he reads the papers and does the crosswords.

‘It was a work thing, Mummy. Please don’t make it worse. Believe me, I feel wretched.’

Wretched – a word I’d only use with my mother. A bit like how I still call my parents ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’, like I’m five years old, or posh enough to have grown up with horses and nannies, which isn’t true. My parents are just old. My mother reads the classics. It’s the way I was raised to speak with them.

I blow my nose into a tissue and the snot that comes out is rippled with black. London pollution is, if you believe the news, worse than Beijing.

‘All these showbiz parties, I don’t know,’ my mother tut-tuts down the line.

‘It wasn’t a party, Mummy.’