I grabbed one of her flailing hands and pulled down roughly, sloshing my pint all over the floor, and both of us. ‘It’s totally someone’s fault, Lou.’

I remember a distortion of white and purple noise as a roar of faceless voices in my head started shouting, Stop, stop now! Abort mission! Ah, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I didn’t. Because I was full of beer and grief and that thing that had been festering inside me for more than a decade. Someone tried to take the half-empty pint glass out of my hand, and I shrugged them off roughly. I still wince at the possibility it was that lovely ninety-five-year-old lady, but I wince more at the memory of the words that came next, seasoned with bile from the drunkest man on the planet.

‘It’s your fault, Lou. It’s your fault. Mum would still be here if it wasn’t for you and those—’ I had to stop and have another go, as the words slurred over my lips. ‘Those fucking shoes. It’s your. Fucking. Fault. Lou.’

My beer-holding arm made an involuntary arc and the remainder of the pint went north before heading south, over my shoes and a few of the remaining guests. Later, I’d wondered if it was my body having one last try to say, Whoa, idiot, this isn’t good, maybe we need to step in here. Catch them, catch those words before it’s too late.

But nobody caught them. The silence rolled over that bar like a London pea-souper and, as the weight of my words settled, there was nobody more shocked than me that I’d finally gone and accused my sister of being to blame for my mother’s death. And I say that hand on heart.

There was even a moment as I stood there staring at Lou’s slack jaw and agonised face that I thought maybe it really hadn’t been me. I flung my head drunkenly around and looked behind me just in case, but the sparse semi-circle of aghast faces and hands frozen halfway to mouths left me in no doubt. And after saying the thing that couldn’t be unsaid, I felt a strange calmness.

Naturally, I carried on drinking, because that was what Danny Mulberry did when things got tough, especially back then. I sat on my own in the corner of a strange pub and quickly and deliberately finished myself off.

She found me, though, my sister. Even after what I’d said, she still came looking, because she was Lou and because we were all each other had. And when she followed me out, head down and teary, of course I should have apologised in that grimy pub car park. Been a bigger person, an older brother, a better man. But most likely precisely because I am a man, with all the stubbornness and pig-headedness of a million men before me, when my sister stood in front of me, hands clenched at her sides, I pushed my own hands deep into the pockets of my jeans, so deep I could have touched my own toes if I hadn’t been so drunk, and I walked away.