The Friday my grandmother died was one of four in the rainiest April in twenty-two years and, according to Google, there were thirty-two road incidents within a four-hour period on the M25. It was a day notable for all the wrong reasons, another one being that Lou was in the car with her; a gem I found out the next year, when I was nine and evidently old enough to know but not old enough for any details. It went all quiet on the western front until I was ten, when Lou told me why they’d been out on the roads in such shitty weather, anyway.

My grandmother had told everyone they were off on a day out to Brighton to buy Lou some special ballet shoes. They sang songs and played I-Spy in the car on the way down, and Lou kept her fingers crossed the whole time, because she couldn’t believe her luck and nothing was going to make that wonderful day go wrong, not even the weather. When they got to Brighton, her mother held her hand and they wandered the Lanes in their anoraks and she told Lou they were actually there on a different very important mission. When they found the place, her mother turned the hand-stitched leather cricket ball around and around in her hands, running her fingers over the gold embossed printing. She told the man in the shop it was perfect, just perfect, then gave it to Lou and told her to keep it safe in her little backpack until her brother’s birthday next week.

Afterwards, they went to Primark and bought some pink sequinned ballet shoes for their cover story, and had fish and chips at Harry Ramsden’s. You mustn’t tell him, my grandmother had said. It’s a big, big secret. And you mustn’t give it to him without me, because it’s from both of us. Promise? Lou promised, because of course you would, and she still couldn’t believe her luck.

When I was eleven, Lou told me she’d hung upside down by her seatbelt in the back of the car, with her mother dead in the front, and that when she finally heard sirens, she’d thought it was a big, beautiful bird coming to rescue her. The men from the fire brigade ground away with their power tools to get her out, sparks flying all around her, and even through all that noise, the only sound she could hear clearly was the drip, drip, drip of the rain bouncing off her dead mother’s yellow anorak. And all she could think about was that cricket ball sitting in the bottom of her backpack and how now her brother was never going to have it, because she’d promised.

So that was the second thing I found out about my Uncle Danny.

When I was thirteen, I ran to Boots in a downpour at half past eight at night to buy earplugs because Lou couldn’t stand the noise of the rain. I got back and she was on the sofa with a photo album open at a picture of her as a baby, on my grandmother’s lap. In it, my grandfather is standing behind them with a proud look on his face, and baby Lou and her mother are staring right into the camera, smiling the exact same smile at whoever’s taking the picture. Lou put the earplugs in straight away and lay down on the sofa and closed her eyes.