I’m not very good at drinking. It’s never been my forte. It isn’t a great idea when you have seizures – my mother hardly ever drank, just a glass of brandy at Christmas, while my father stuck to the odd glass of stout. The wine culture of my friends and their parents wasn’t something I had grown up with and although I tried, occasionally, I secretly viewed drinking as something that was on the long list of things I was a little bit scared of and a little bit scornful about.

Everyone brought cards and presents, which was sweet – pointless presents, mostly: scented candles, to join the row of unused scented candles that rimmed my bathtub; a set of pencils decorated in different coloured patterns with a matching notebook; a cookbook that I already owned. I knew that at some stage, there would be cake. Rosaria had already been up to the bar a couple of times and done a bit of nodding and whispering.

Most of the people in the group had met Matty by then. While I was being queen of the party on the sofa, he was talking to Rosaria’s stepsister Jasmine on the other side of the room. Jasmine was a nurse and worked at the hospital. She was twenty-six years old. She wasn’t pretty like Rosaria but she had a quality about her that I recognised as the sort of thing men liked and other women didn’t, a kind of hair-flicking pseudo-shyness, a way of looking wide-eyed, younger than her years. She was wearing a black off-the-shoulder jumper that showed her smooth skin and had her dark hair in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. Every now and then, a strand of hair would escape the messy bun and fall over her face so that she had to flip it back behind her gold hoop earrings. The frequency with which this happened implied it was no accident. Matty had a beer bottle in his hand and was smiling at her. They had been talking together all evening. I had decided not to notice.

Someone bought a bottle of rosé wine, which disagrees with me but I drank it anyway once the white had run out. The cake came out, carried aloft by a grinning young woman and supervised by the man from behind the bar. It turned out Rosaria had had it delivered that afternoon. She had ordered it specially from the Polish bakers that liked to decorate their cakes with icing rosebuds and fresh strawberries. It had nine candles.

‘Why nine?’ I shrieked after I had blown them out, while everyone was still whooping and applauding.

‘Three and six!’ shouted Rosaria, pointing at the way they were arranged. ‘Three and six, you idiot!’