‘Shanghai!’ Cherry Lau used to live next door to us, above her parents’ takeaway place. She was round at ours all the time, when she wasn’t working there. And when she was, I was over there. For a while.

‘Yeah, she looks ever so glam. Expat husband. Two children, like me. Doing ever so well for herself.’

Like me, I think she’s going to repeat, but she doesn’t. Angela’s eventual escape was rather glamorous, too. She went long haul, flying by British Airways to Halifax Stanfield International Airport, Nova Scotia, with Warren the pottery teacher, when she was nineteen. She ended up getting a job in air traffic control at that very airport; she was one of the top people, until she had the girls – Clara when she was forty-one and Amelie when she was forty-three – via IVF. A whole life was waiting for her in Nova Scotia. Dad and I didn’t even know she was on that British Airways flight – we thought she’d gone on a girls’ weekend to Camber Sands. But she did it. She escaped Dad and me – the burden of the blind father and the ugly sister – to take off into the love story of the century.

Bloody bon voyage, Angela!

‘Did Cherry ask after me?’ I say.

‘No.’

I am not surprised. I did the dirty, eventually, on Cherry, the ‘funny little Chinese girl’ – as she was horribly christened at school – who lived next door and temporarily became my best friend, until I fucked things up.

‘You don’t ever speak to her?’

‘No.’ I don’t speak to anyone, I think, no one at all. And I don’t particularly want to speak to you, either, Angela. Not even every three months.

‘Right, I guess I’ll have to call back again,’ she says. ‘To speak to Dad … Do it as soon as you wake up, can you? The photo? I don’t mind what time it is here.’

No. ‘Yes, OK.’

We used to sit and chat for hours, me and Angela. Usually on her bed, while I painted her nails and she scolded me for not doing it right. We’d laugh, too. Laugh so hard at ridiculous things until one of us fell off the bed and dragged the other with her on to the pink fluffy rug with all the gum and hairclips and jelly sweets embedded in it, and we’d lie there looking at the cracks in the ceiling and giggling at other ridiculous things until Angela got bored and would get up.

‘Can I leave you with something?’

‘If you have to. What is it?’

‘Be the change you wish to see in the world. Gandhi said that.’

Unbelievable.

‘Bye, Angela.’