‘Let me finish! Please! Ever since our last dog, Folly, trotted out of The Palladian with that woman, it was a soulless existence in that flat – Dad so depressed and all his cheerful hope gone; you fighting your own demons, as always. It’s like you both just gave up! I felt I was being gradually swallowed up by it all. Our home life. I ran away because I couldn’t bear it. I missed the three of us. I had missed Mum for so many years and now I was missing the two of you as well, because it was like you were both there but yet you weren’t. I missed the fun and happiness we used to have. I missed everything.’

At home, in The Palladian – behind closed doors – we had known fun and our own brand of happiness, before the guide dogs had to go. The hole Mum left in our lives had been closed over by the three of us until it wasn’t visible any more and its seams remained invisible, despite Dad going blind. Despite the things that had happened to me. When the dogs left, didn’t that hole we’d closed over open up and swallow Dad into it, with me jumping in willingly after him? Isn’t that something I’ve always known?

‘I had to make my own life,’ she continues. ‘Some kind of life. Because our life in London was life in the dark.’

‘You left when we needed you most,’ I say to her. ‘We needed your sunniness to pick us up and stop us falling into that darkness – but you took it away.’

For much of my life, I’ve wanted to keep the light from me. I’ve slouched along, living it with headlights at half-beam. I let something bad happen to me as a teenager. I was raped, in my twenties, by a man who saw that distance and breached it, with lamps turned down low and an insidious force that nearly destroyed me. I’ve wanted to talk, but not about the things that matter. Did Angela feel the light go out on her, too? I thought she was OK, that she was immune to everything. That her determined self-centredness shielded her from any despair; that she remained carefree, doing her own thing, until doing her own thing meant leaving us.

Have I always been so wrapped up in my own issues that I just couldn’t see what was really going on with her?

‘I had to,’ she says quietly. ‘I just had to. Something else happened around that time, you know. Before I left.’

‘Something else?’

‘Mum came back.’

‘She came back in nineteen eighty-four … The time with the Opal Fruits and the Choose Life T-shirt …’ The day of Finsbury Park. ‘That was the last time.’