‘I worry about you.’ She adds a couple of glugs of convenience-store vodka to her glass. ‘Burning the candle at both ends. Working all hours.’

‘I’m OK, Mum. Just tired.’ He can scarcely remember feeling more wide awake in his life. But, though he’s got no intention of going anywhere tonight, he still feels a strange urgency to be doing nothing, to be defying the note’s odd instructions, alone.

‘Are you? This business of walking Beppo. First thing in the morning. Last thing at night.’ She eyes him over the rim of her glass as she takes a sip.

Will looks at his feet. He’s in no hurry to explain.

‘Always were the sensitive little soul of the two of you.’

‘Got something for you,’ Will snaps, diving back into the hallway and reaching inside his coat. ‘Payday. Some housekeeping.’

He peels off four tenners and deposits them in the biscuit jar.

‘Sit down,’ she tells him. ‘You always look so jumpy these days. Have a drink if you want. Think there’s some juice in the fridge. Takes the edge off.’

Will perches on the edge of the armchair opposite his mum, checking through the gap in the curtains that every other house in the neighbourhood is still shrouded in darkness.

‘I’d rather you kept all your wages,’ his mum says. ‘If he paid his way …’

Will waves the point away, hearing the bitterness gathering in her tone. Booze coupled with talk of his dad is never a great combination, and he’s thinking of how he might change the subject. He’s too slow.

‘If he paid his way,’ she says, ‘we might be in a better position.’

Will shrugs. ‘It’s –’

‘One day I’ll tell you what sort of a man your dad really is.’

‘Rather stay out of it.’

‘I know you would, my love.’ She reaches forward to pat him on the knee but misjudges the distance and has to grab the arm of the sofa to avoid falling off. ‘Find it all upsetting, don’t you?’

‘It’s fine.’

It isn’t. Never has been. Sometimes he almost forgets. He can be heading home and his mind will have tripped back a couple of years, reset to how things were. And then the remembering will hit him like a train – the realization that not only did his parents split, but somehow the people they used to be died at that moment too.

‘He’s been saying something,’ Will’s mum says. She leaves an overlong pause now she has Will’s full attention. ‘He’s worried that you’re …’

‘I’m what?’

She leans forward and whispers, boozy breath wafting over Will, ‘A nancy boy.’

‘He said that?’

Will feels no offence at the suggestion of him being gay. It’s the choice of words that bothers him, the contempt in the term; he can hear the distaste with which his dad would utter it.