I felt a rush of blood heading for my ears and then, as it passed, complete silence. I let out the breath I hadn’t even known I was holding and pushed down against the floor to get myself upright. Spaghetti arms, don’t fail me now.

‘Don’t, Lou.’

I heard it. I knew it had come from me. But it felt like someone else had control of my voice, my legs, my spaghetti arms. Doesn’t she know? someone else’s voice inside my head asked. After all this time, doesn’t she know that’s the one thing I can’t talk about? The day my mother should have been shopping for chops and frozen chips at Tesco, or getting her hair done, or cutting all the roses in the garden. Anything except driving back along the M25 in the rain with a stupid pair of ballet shoes for a girl who had every colour except pink.

Lou looked at me uncertainly, like she was deciding whether to retreat or plough on and risk it all, like little Lou would have done. She blinked and I was twenty-three years old and full of shit, saying the thing I didn’t take back. That I still hadn’t. I wondered for a second if she was there too, but then her shoulders slumped and something in her expression shifted. I saw that whatever she’d been going to say would stay unsaid. I’d won, and I realised with a strange lack of surprise that was how it had always been. The only way I could ever win against Lou was when she let me.

My sister inclined her head in an almost imperceptible nod and it kind of broke my heart.

Much later, after I’d tidied the dressings and antiseptic away in the hall cupboard and rinsed out the bowl, after I’d taken Gentleman for a long, silent walk around the park, and even after I’d spent two hours finally digging and planting a vegetable garden that’d make Monty Don do cartwheels, I still couldn’t forget that look on Lou’s face. It wasn’t disappointment, it was worse than that. It was acceptance. Acceptance of a man who still couldn’t do any better, despite sixteen long years, although also possibly because of them.

With shoes still on but a brief, comforting thought of heading to the pub abandoned, I lay on top of my bed and reached for the pile of letters on my milk crate table. I shuffled through them aimlessly, thinking about little Lou and my father and the smell of Miss Dior and brandy. And I wondered who my mother really was and who Lou had become because of it.

WILL

Dear Danny Mulberry, according to the newspaper you are a kind, wise and spiritual man. A good man, by their account – the accompanying photographic evidence notwithstanding, I can only assume. As those are all qualities I’ve realised I’m sadly lacking, I thought perhaps you might find it within you to share some of that wisdom, and perhaps even a smidgen of spirituality.