Memories are the stuff you can’t declutter. Here’s another one: it dates from an evening long ago when we were all watching a talk show. One of the guests asked what the others would remember in the last minutes of their lives. An ad break intervened, and Chanel said, ‘Such a good question! I’ll have to think about that,’ and I said, ‘What about you, Ivy? What do you think will come into your mind?’

Ivy was knitting. ‘The moment I first held you,’ she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact. She came to the end of a radiation-green row and began counting stitches. I have no reason to remember this – it was only a routine example of Ivy’s self-deceit.

I set it beside something else I remember. When I was about five, there was a party for my stepfather’s birthday. Ivy wore wide, soft silver trousers. She dabbed perfume on her neck and wrists, whistling all the while – it was a time when I often heard her whistle. I could say that I loved her but would it be true? The word itself meant nothing then. ‘Love’ was something like a perfume to me and something like a tune.

The party began, and I wandered among the guests, helping myself to food from trays. In one room there was a piano that I liked to play by thumping my fists on the keys. It was occupied by a wilted aunt of Ivy’s, so I went into a bedroom – whose? – and crawled under the bed. I picked at the skin around my fingernails. Soon I’d be missed – what an uproar! Ivy would grow frantic. She’d run through the house and out into the garden, calling my name, her trousers shining among trees.

When I woke, the house was quiet. I went along a corridor and found my stepfather with a small group, their chairs drawn close, deep in the endless, dreary adult pastime of talk. Unnoticed, I passed onto the veranda and there, at the far end, were the silver trousers. Ivy was leaning on the balustrade with a friend of hers, a woman whose hair made a golden rope around her head. At the sight of the silver and gold, I said to myself, The stars and the sun. Ivy called, ‘Up so late, little prince?’ but went on talking to her friend. When children hide, they’re asking to be found. Who doesn’t understand that? When Ivy was a child, did she play a game called hide-and-ignore?

Don’t think that I waste any sympathy on that boy. I left him there, curled up with his dust bunnies in the dark. He has nothing to do with the person I’ve become. It’s just that the past crouches and waits, and springs from the long grass.