Angela was always moving on. I knew she would run away. As she approached the end of her teens you could see the waves of restlessness just rolling off her like static electricity. She plotted her escape for a year. She hung around the local community college, attended a pottery class, but mostly she lurked in the café so she could chat up wealthy foreign students who’d come to learn English; she hoped that one of them would take her away from all this. The poor sap she eventually ensnared was actually the pottery teacher – thirty-one-year-old Warren Defaille from Nova Scotia, who was returning to Canada at the end of the summer term. She went with him.

I adjust the phone slightly away from my ear: Angela’s voice is loud.

‘Have you left the flat recently?’

‘No,’ I say. I’m not telling her about the dentist and the ‘jumper’ and the card. I never tell her anything.

‘Dad should see people,’ she says, after a giant tut (I don’t bother to pick her up on her terrible choice of words). ‘It’s no good for either of you, being stuck in that flat. You really should make a change, reconfigure your lives.’

When did my little sister become so humourlessly superior? I wonder. It hadn’t always been this way. At one time we had fun. At one time I was her protector. Now I refuse to stroke her inflated ego and her younger-sister-made-good superiority. To indulge her transatlantic tripe.

‘So, what’s the favour, Angela?’ I repeat. ‘Is it, you know, the one about looking after our father for ever so that you don’t have to?’

Angela sighs back at me. ‘Oh, Prue. Really? That self-pitying baloney again? You’ve said yourself he doesn’t need looking after. No, the favour is, actually, dig up a photo for me and send me a shot of it? Please. I told Warren about that picture of us on the beach in Old Leigh – you know, up from Southend – when I fell in that rock pool and got a crab on the end of my nose?’ She laughs her flute-y laugh; the one that really irritates me.

‘Yeah, I know the one,’ I say. And I had a massive birthmark on my face – permanently – I think. Nobody even used suncream in those days, so it would shine out like a Belisha beacon from the coast. Ships used to launch themselves at it. ‘All right, I’ll look for it. Is there anything else?’ I add. I’m beginning to get a headache and I want to go back to sleep.

‘No, there’s nothing else. Hey, you haven’t heard from Cherry Lau, have you?’

‘Cherry Lau?’ There was a blast from the past. ‘No, why?’

‘She found me on Facebook. She sent me a message.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah, she’s in corporate entertaining or something now, in Shanghai.’