I leave the shop and Maya looking both bemused and concerned and walk the two doors to the travel agent’s. There’s a woman at the desk. She is not my mum. There’s a laugh and a door opens at the back of the shop and a different woman walks out.

‘Hello,’ I say.

She is short, like me, and is wearing an A-line black skirt and a pair of silver flat sandals and a dark grey sleeveless T-shirt and she has the same hairstyle as me, including the fringe, except her hair is a stripy palette of blonde and grey highlights. She’s not a hippy or a punk or an eighties Wham! fan. She looks a little like she did when we were young.

‘Hello,’ she says. Actually, she looks like she’s seen a ghost, which is what is happening here, after all. I am a ghost, and she is a ghost to me.

‘Hello,’ I say again. I know she knows it’s me. I mean, there’s no mistaking me, is there? I could be immediately pulled from any line-up. I’m amazed she looks so familiar, though. I thought she’d be all drug-addled, starey-eyed and Starflowered; wizened and ruined by substance abuse. But her eyes are clear and her face is relatively unlined. It doesn’t tally with Angela’s description of her from 1990. Of Starflower. Age and recreational drug use have clearly been kind to her, after all.

‘Would you like to go and get a coffee with me?’ I ask. ‘Can you take half an hour off?’

A half-hour audience with my mother. Half an hour after thirty-four years. It’s not much to ask, is it? And I think it will be enough.

‘Can you hold the fort here?’ my mother asks the woman at the desk and the woman nods. ‘I’ll just get my bag,’ she adds, and she turns and goes back through the end door. I wonder if there’s a window at the back, an escape hatch, so she can run away again. Is she now squeezing her body through a narrow gap and preparing to leg it down the road? Does she have a hippy friend waiting for her in a 1970s getaway van?

She reappears. I walk to the exit and she follows. We slip out the door and we are walking down the street.

‘How did you know I was here?’

It’s so weird hearing her voice, the same one that used to tell us to eat up all our fishfingers or do up our shoes. It’s perhaps a little huskier, but I would know it anywhere.

‘You look nice grey,’ I say. ‘Grey-y blonde. It suits you.’ I deliberately don’t answer her question. I don’t have any explaining to do; she does.

‘Thanks, it’s been like this for ages.’