Even when I’d straightened the sheet back over the boxes and tea chests, I stayed, as I sometimes found Gentleman, facing the corner, silent and staring at nothing. I didn’t see any of that wonderful invisible stuff dogs see, but maybe those guys are on to something, because in that little moment I took, it dawned on me that it didn’t matter I had no idea what to say, because Lou just needed me to listen.

When I walked over and sat back down on the floor in front of her, I noticed a few tiny spots of blood seeping through the new layers of gauze on her leg wound. My fingers were itching to unwrap the bandages again and check on it, but Lou took a couple of shallow breaths and kept talking as if the box landslide hadn’t happened.

‘After Mum died, I remember thinking that even though it looked like you were still there, it was like she’d taken you with her. That me and Dad were the only ones left behind.’ Ah, the times I’d wished exactly that.

‘Do you remember her perfume? Miss Dior?’

I tried to nod, but just the mention of it sent a rush up my nostrils like snuff. That smell was such a powerful part of my memories of her; like her pale hazel eyes, or the tiny mole on her cheek, or the way she always pushed her hair to the left. If Monsieur Dior himself had come out and announced he’d created his signature scent with her in mind I’d have believed it, no questions asked. A few years ago, I was heading home to my bedsit in Kilburn in the middle of winter, covered in damp, grey dust from a building site, when I’d smelled it on an invisible commuter. I stayed on the Tube fifteen minutes past my stop to breathe it in, and when I woke up the next morning with a screaming hangover and no recollection of leaving the pub, that lingering aroma in my nostrils was all the excuse I’d needed to roll over and lose myself another job.

‘I kept that last bottle of perfume of hers for years,’ Lou said. ‘Eked it out, drop by drop, special occasions only.’ She rubbed a hand distractedly over the bandage on her leg and I willed her not to risk ruining my good work. ‘I never could work out why it didn’t smell quite the same on me though. It used to really bother me.’ I imagined her bumping the top off the scab. ‘Then once, at a staff Christmas party, one of the girls from Accounts got a bit tipsy and spilled her brandy and soda all over me. When I went into the toilets to dry my top off under the hand dryer, all of a sudden, Mum was back.’

I was a couple of seconds behind Lou’s words but she wasn’t waiting for me.

‘That day, Danny, in the car – me and Mum.’