‘She just kind of . . . changed when you were around, you know?’ Lou was on a roll now, and no, I really didn’t know. ‘When it was just me and her, there were times when she sat in the same place for hours and hours, reading or sleeping or staring out of the window. But then you’d walk in the door from school and she . . . she sort of came alive.’

The memory of a woman who fizzed and laughed and dived headfirst on to the trampoline slipped into my head. A woman who took on hide and seek with the enthusiasm of a five-year-old, and snuggled on the sofa and whispered secrets. Who played one-on-one cricket in the garden with me until it was so dark we couldn’t see the ball. That was my mother. Our mother. Wasn’t it?

‘I guess it was like she always saved the good stuff for you, Danny.’

I rolled Lou’s words around in my head, trying to make sense of them. Was it true? Had our mother treated us so differently? How would I not have noticed something like that? Then I remembered how easily I’d stopped noticing Lou when I’d wanted to.

I tried to dredge up an image of Lou snuggling with my mother on the sofa, watching television, whispering secrets, and I couldn’t. It seemed like I was never off my mother’s lap or out of her arms, though. Even when I got older, she’d grab me as I walked past and playfully pull me in to her, ruffling my hair and calling me her big baby boy. I’m sure most of my friends would have died if their mothers had done that, but I used to just lean back into her and think, Yes. Yes, I am.

I thought about the times my mother got out her old photo albums and called me to come and sit with her. ‘Danny, come look.’ We’d curl up like a couple of puzzle pieces with our hands on the crackly pages and work our way through countless photos of her as a teenager, on the beach, in cafes drinking hot chocolate, sitting on a car bonnet in her school uniform. Then a little older with a glass of wine in her hand, dressed up in shiny leggings, staring at the camera through blue and green and purple eyeshadow, in denim jackets and pyjamas, in black leather skirts and the highest of high red heels. And even though I knew exactly what she was going to say about every photo, almost word for word, I never tired of it.

‘That’s me when I was fifteen, Danny. Fifteen, can you imagine? That one’s us on the beach in Dorset. Just look at that gorgeous weather, will you?’ And I’d ask question after question. When did you go? What did you eat? Who’s that? What about him? Not until I’d squeezed every bit of information out of her would I slide my finger down to the next photo and the whole process would start again.