She didn’t share Jeremy’s vivid memories of the years spent with their father. At the time, she couldn’t make sense of her fear: she was too young to grasp the terrible reality that her father regularly beat the living shit out of her mother. She woke to muffled screams behind closed doors; she noticed make-up covering bruises; she watched her mother clean blood from walls and surfaces while listening to silly excuses about broken heels, swinging doors and, once, the ridiculous ‘Sure that’s just some jam!’ She was only five when Maisie had spent three weeks in hospital with extensive injuries. Her memories were foggy and confused, filled with blanks and questions. Her mother never spoke about the past and, although Valerie didn’t know a lot, she knew enough not to ask. Her dad was someone she’d buried deep, and with each day that passed, he drifted further and further away. On the very rare occasions he crept into her mind, she pictured him as charming and funny – he had swung her around, raising her high in the air, laughing when she squealed – but beneath that vision of the ideal dad she had a fuzzy recollection of a loud, scary man.

It had been a full seven years since her parents’ marriage had ended and her father had vanished. Her mother hadn’t dated anyone in that time. Aside from Jeremy (and Jeremy didn’t count), their home was man-free, just the way Valerie liked it. Valerie knew Fred as a man in uniform who swooped in and sorted out trouble: he turned up when everyone was crying and left when they had stopped. Her most vivid memory was of waking in his arms when he was carrying her from her bedroom to his car. She was wearing a pink nightdress, patterned with white bunnies. It smelt of soap and he smelt of cigarettes mixed with spicy cologne. He’d wrapped her in a blanket and held her close to his chest. When she had woken she had been scared, as any child would have been, to find a giant with a black beard holding her tight, and she’d cried. He’d smiled at her, wiped away the tears with his free hand, told her she was safe and that he was minding her mammy. ‘Do you love your mammy?’ he asked her.

She’d nodded.

‘Well, she needs you to be strong,’ he said, ‘and I promise I’ll keep you all safe.’ Five-year-old Valerie wasn’t sure what was happening but in that moment she felt safer than she ever had before.