They both fell quiet – or rather, silent – as I re-entered the room. I went straight to my father because I felt so cross that I knew if I didn’t go straight to him and get it over and done with, I might not be able to kiss him goodbye at all.

‘Don’t get up,’ I said, as he half rose, and we shared a clumsy embrace, me wrapping my arms around him from behind and kissing the top of his head, him patting my forearm as it rested briefly across his chest. He sat again and I skirted the table to my mother, saying, ‘Just remembered, didn’t put food on the landing for the cat.’ Our downstairs neighbour, Mrs Abaza, had a scrawny tortoiseshell cat that roamed up and down the stairwell whining and we had taken to feeding it. We did it surreptitiously, as Mrs Abaza was not the sort of person you wanted to catch you feeding her cat – she was always complaining about us putting too much rubbish in the communal bins as well as banging the door. She would sweep the hallway with an old-fashioned bristled broom as we went past and stare at us with a hot look. Matty called her Mad Cat Lady.

‘Bye, love,’ my mother called out after me as I went swiftly into the hallway, pulling open the front door, a slight note of bafflement in it I thought, at my peremptory departure.

‘Bye!’ My father’s voice was more cheery.

‘Bye, thanks, bye!’ I called back.

I stomped off down the Close with pointless haste. My parents. So well-meaning; so annoying. It was like being thirteen again and the only truculent teenager in the house, with no sibling to share the door slamming, the hatred – oh, all that inward-turning agony, thumping my own thighs in the bedroom, furious and boiling with frustration. Why was I me?

I never saw either of them alone, it struck me then, not even now I was fully grown and had been for some years. My parents always put up a united front. They didn’t see themselves as united against me, of course, they loved me, but that was still how it felt – it was still me and them. They had been alone together for eight years before I was born and they had lived alone together for the last twelve years, since I had left home. I was just a blip. We weren’t a family. They were a couple with a child.

As I turned the corner into Dogsthorpe Road, I tripped on a loose concrete slab on the pavement. I lost my balance momentarily, wrenched my knee, swore beneath my breath. It started to rain.

*