When Lou came back, weighed down by an armful of cans of coloured hair paint from her birthday party, my mother sprayed my spiky tufts not only blue and green and red, but also yellow and pink and purple. And when she’d finished, she walked me over to the hall mirror and stood behind me, hands on my shoulders, looking at my stiff, rainbow-coloured barnet like it was a work of art.

‘Got yourself quite the little technicolour garden, haven’t you, Danny?’

I remember Lou was standing to the left, or it could have been the right (confusing when a memory is a mirror), just out of frame, as my mother and I smiled at our own reflections. Maybe it’s strange to remember something like that so clearly, but I do, because it was the first time I realised I was the same height as her. I guess on some level maybe I knew that meant I was growing up, and that days like those might be gone soon. That being as tall as your mum signalled the end of something. Just for a few seconds, looking in that mirror, I’d felt inexplicably sad and, actually, it probably isn’t that strange that I remember it. Because that day really was the end of something, and the last time my mother ever cut my hair.

I finished dressing Lou’s leg in comfortable silence, in no hurry to rush out of my head and slam the door behind me on the memory. I was silently complimenting myself on the artistry of my neat, firm bandaging when I heard a metallic noise. Lou was holding the scissors I’d used for the gauze and slowly snipping at the air.

‘How about it, Danny? You game?’

The face smiling down at me looked a lot like that small girl with her arms full of party hair spray, and it only took a second to realise what she meant. I ran my hands through the mess on my head, and I was never going to say no to my sister.

‘Well, it couldn’t look any worse than it does now. Why not?’

I blame Dom. He’d made a crack about my hair that morning and I had absolutely no comeback, because his hair, just like his manners and his character, is always impeccable. When he’d cocked his head to the side, narrowed his eyes and said, oh yeah, that reminded him he wanted to take George to the Changing of the Guards at Buckingham Palace, I had to concede I was well overdue for a haircut.

Naturally, George had thought the whole thing was hilarious, once Dom gently explained the joke. He started running around the house shouting how I’d better be careful I didn’t swear in front of the Queen, and was I going to eat some beef for my lunch. He put a high-pitched, eardrum-murdering emphasis on the words eeeeeeeat and beeeeeeeef. Lou had been sitting in the kitchen doing the crossword in Dom’s Guardian and she didn’t look up, but I’d seen her shoulders shaking.