May is saying something now but I can’t hear her for the rush of the water. I help her onto the shower seat and she doesn’t protest. The water runs into her eyes and she closes them. She puts her head down and crouches forward so it runs in a stream down her back. Her skin is pale and papery. Red blotches where the water hits it. I turn the dial away from the hot setting. Just a little. A quarter of an inch. There’s a loud knock on the door.

‘Ok, ok! I’m nearly done here!’

Gloves on. Soap out. May starts to rock back and forth, she’s saying something but I can’t make it out.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘Let’s just get this over with as quickly as we can.’

I can smell lunch cooking while I’m walking May in to have her breakfast. It’s enough to turn your stomach. Over-boiled vegetables and gravy. Almost like the roast dinners Mum used to cook before the cancer, before Dadi moved over from Pakistan to look after us and changed everything. ‘Indulge me,’ Mum would say to Baba as she put the dishes on the table, ‘for just this one thing.’ She sang while she peeled the vegetables. She dressed up on Sundays. She wore a shalwar kameez and eyeliner that made her eyes look even bluer than normal. It was like she was putting on a costume. As though she was trying to balance out the Englishness of the food. I asked her once why she always cooked it if she knew he didn’t like it. She smiled and bent over and whispered in my ear, ‘I’ll tell you a secret, Sana – but you have to promise never to tell it to anyone else.’

I nodded. She leant in closer until I could feel her lips on my ear lobe, until it tickled and I couldn’t bear to wait any longer.

‘Roast potatoes are your Baba’s absolute favourite.’

‘Then why doesn’t he say so?’

She laughed. ‘Because if we all said what we were really thinking, the world would probably stop spinning.’

I imagined our funny little island on the globe in Baba’s study, gliding round out of sight, stuck in darkness forever.

‘Did I tell you he has red hair?’ May whispers as I pull a chair out for her and spoon some gloopy porridge into a bowl.

‘You mean Arthur, May? Your husband?’

‘No, not him. The boy.’

‘I think you might have mentioned it.’