‘JEANIE AND HARRY,’ the crowd cheered as one, before John gave a salute and sauntered down from the stage, where one of his brothers pretended to punch him and another got him in a headlock. Meanwhile Paula, their sister, was making I-see-you gestures at her teenage sons, who were minesweeping random abandoned glasses of alcohol (please God, let them make it through the party without throwing up). Stephen’s partner, Eddie, was surreptitiously checking eBay on his phone (the Mortimers en masse always drove him to reckless spending). And Bunny, Dave’s girlfriend, had decided it was time to slather on another coat of Frosted Raspberry lipstick, if only to stop her eating anything else from the buffet. Diet-tip number 376, she thought to herself, heels clicking as she tottered across the parquet floor.

They knew how to throw a good party, did the Mortimers. Birthdays, Christmas, Halloween: you name it, they’d be there with their dance-floor playlists and groaning buffet tables, everyone in their finery and up for a good time. Sometimes there would be a theme – Hollywood Glamour, for example, or Guilty Pleasures – when the more imaginative family members would go to town with elaborate costumes and wigs, and props and decor would be sourced weeks in advance. There would be dancing. Drunkenness. Cake. Nostalgia. Only very occasionally a fight.

Two and a half hours into this particular do and things were starting to hot up, a feeling of looseness in the warm air, the casting aside of inhibitions. The cask of Black Sheep best bitter had already run out, the gallons of home-brew that Harry had brought along reduced to their last cloudy dregs, and all that remained of the buffet were a few dried-up sandwiches curling at the corners on a plate.

The tables had been shunted to the sides of the hall, and now they had the Tom Jones impersonator giving it his pleather-trousered, open-shirted all up on stage, while a throng of dancers joined in with complete abandon below. Everyone was happy, everyone was enjoying themselves, and a deep feeling of contentment swept over Robyn as she cleared egg-mayonnaise-smeared paper plates into a bin bag and neatly stacked the empty platters. This was where she belonged – to this family, this tribe. Growing up as the only child of a single parent, enduring quiet Christmases and lonely holidays when she’d been too shy to strike up any friendships at the campsite kiddies’ clubs, she still sometimes felt like pinching herself that she was a part of the noisy, gregarious Mortimer clan.