It’s a mere thirty-six hours since I last saw the children, but that’s plenty of time for them to have switched their allegiance to Candy and Sharleen. As soon as they hear my voice there’s a stampede along the upstairs corridor of Prestcott’s Hotel as they make off in the opposite direction. Blood might be thicker than water, but it’s still very much thinner than an evening of television and room service combined and the children have apparently never known joy like it. Sharleen, on the other hand, wears the shell-shocked expression of someone who’s just been presented with an accumulated thirty-year tax bill. She stands outside the swing doors of the hotel’s saloon and waves us down the street with small flipper-like movements of her hand.

‘Why are you walking like that?’ Jack asks as I lift Emmy into the truck.

‘I hurt my leg.’

‘Really? Is it bad? Can I see?’

I pull up my jeans. The children are duly impressed by the crisp new layers of bandage, administered earlier, along with a vicious anti-tetanus shot, by the cute doctor in the medical centre.

‘It looks really bad.’

‘Why, this iddy-biddy little thing?’ I say nonchalantly. ‘Shucks, it was nothing.’

‘Did it bleed?’

‘A bit.’

They summon forth a vaguely sympathetic grunt.

‘Actually,’ I say, piqued to have lost their attention so quickly, ‘it bled a lot, I mean it was pretty deep.’

In the revisionist version of this incident, exaggeration is already hardening to fact and, as recounted first to the doctor and now to the children, the quantity of blood gets measured in litres rather than pints, the eight-inch nail grows exponentially, and the hole it makes widens to the length and depth of a mine shaft. All mention of fainting and sobbing has been ruthlessly exorcized in favour of a story about courage in the face of adversity. In reality the leg underneath the bandage had been something of a let-down. The flesh had been pleasingly swollen and pink, but without the pulsing blood, without the stained and grimy bandage, it looked curiously dead – a limb that had been allowed to wallow in the bath, or a shank of mutton left to unthaw in the sink. It’s hard to sustain a tale of courage against adversity about sitting in the bath too long, but that doesn’t mean to say I didn’t give it my all.

‘Mummy?’ Emmy says from the back seat.

‘What?’

‘I would hate it if you died.’

‘I’d hate it too.’ I sneak a hand through the seat divide and find hers. ‘So don’t worry, I won’t.’

‘Imagine if you were in an orphanage and you were the only one there. You were the only one whose mother and father died.’ Tears fill her eyes and her voice cracks. ‘That would be so unfair.’

‘Oh, Emmy,’ I say.