He takes my face in his hands and kisses the top of my head before pulling me into a hug. He’s boiling. God knows why, but he’s wearing his smartest winter coat. And the checked shirt beneath is fastened up to the top button. Little beads of sweat sit beneath his dark grey hairline – the neatest hairline you’ll ever see on a man of sixty-three; it’s not receding a jot. We’re the same height when I wear shoes, something he’s never come to terms with since I hit fifteen, remarking often, ‘God knows where we got this one from’. Although there’s no denying he’s my dad. We have the same wide grin, the same piercing blue eyes. The same patience with my mother.

A flush rattles through the flat and she emerges from the bathroom, her lipstick reapplied.

‘Bloody hell, Chloe, you couldn’t swing a cat in there,’ she says.

My mum combs through her auburn bob – highlighted with the cap – with her hands before dabbing her forehead and above her upper lip with her middle fingers. Then she shakes out her loose navy-blue shirt, which is hanging on her small curves.

‘I’m sweating cobs here,’ she says, stating the obvious. ‘I thought you lived in London, love, not halfway to bloody Kent. Them tubes! Jesus!’

My dad lifts up two matching overnight holdalls; grey and pink polka-dot from Matalan that they’ve had ever since I can remember.

‘Eh, Tilly Mint? Where shall I pop these?’ he asks.

I have no words.

What I do have, surprisingly, is energy, and I manage to make it into the kitchen area just before my mum invites herself in. A part of me wants to double-check that Trish is still there, that this isn’t a bonkers dream, or even whether luck is on my side and she’s decided to do one out the back door. But, no. She’s there, hands on hips, poised like a waxwork of herself.

‘You better have a teapot,’ my mum’s saying, her eyebrows instructing my dad to follow her through. ‘I never had a cuppa on the train; they leave the teabag in the plazzy cup. It’s just not proper, is it? I can’t tell you how much I’m gasping for a—Jesus Christ! Oh! Hiya Patricia. What the hell are you doing here?!’

Trish Carmichael – for once, in my experience of knowing her from the telly – joins me in being lost for words, her slim lips open. I need to intervene, to explain (although I’m not sure what I should be explaining) – except I’m far too slow on the ball.

‘Bernie, love,’ my mum says, punching my dad, her teeth clenched. ‘Say hiya.’

‘Hiya, love,’ my dad sings. ‘Y’alright?’

Trish blinks frantically. ‘I’m quite alright. Yes.’