‘Am I annoying?’ I asked, thoughtfully, and quite happily. It was a philosophical question.

‘No, darling.’ My mother’s gentle smile: she was good at those.

‘But I make you tired.’ The previous night, as she had put me to bed and I had begged her to stay in my room, she had answered, ‘Oh, Lisa, it’s time to go to sleep now, Mummy’s tired …’ The insistence that I had to go to sleep because she was tired showed a characteristic lack of logic. Grown-ups. They never made sense.

‘Well,’ she said, still turning the Pyrex dish beneath the water, where it crested the suds occasionally like a whale breaking the surface of the ocean. ‘It’s not because you do anything wrong, it’s just tiring being a mum sometimes.’

‘It’s a long time.’ What I meant was, she would be a mum forever, my mum, to be precise, and I would always be her child. I couldn’t imagine ever turning into an adult – it was no more conceivable than turning into a fairy or a lizard: actually, either of those seemed a great deal more plausible than the thought of ever becoming a creature like my father or mother.

My mother smiled again. ‘Well, it’s a funny thing,’ she said, ‘when you’re a mummy. The days go slowly, but the years go really fast.’

This, I thought, was exactly the kind of nonsense that adults liked to speak.

She fell to the floor. It was quite undramatic – she just slipped down, without any fuss or preamble – one minute she was standing next to me with her hands in the hot water and soapsuds and the next she was on the floor.

It wasn’t the first time and I knew what to do. ‘Dad!!!!’ My voice was a small, high shriek, an unmistakable demand for attention. It was a Saturday and my father was in the garden. I could see him. The back door was open.

‘Dad!!! Mummy’s fallen down!’

He paused for a moment, his face open to the information as he absorbed it; then he came running up the path.

*

One of my school friends, Assia, she was the first to have a child. ‘God, Lisa,’ she said, when I visited to see her and her newborn baby girl – a tiny scrunched-up thing, red to the point of purple, furious at being born – ‘you have no idea. Seriously, the minute you have a child, you forgive your parents everything.’

That felt like putting it a little strongly to me, but who was I to judge?