Dad is tapping me on the shoulder. ‘It’ll be twenty minutes,’ he says, above my low-level Joplin. ‘I’m just toasting the cheese on the top.’ He can’t see the dish he’s created, but he always knows the exact moment it’ll be ready. Picture-perfect food he will never see.

Picture perfect … I remember the photo for Angela. I’ll do it now, before lunch. I don’t want her phoning up again in the middle of the night.

The photo album is on the top shelf of the tall cupboard to the right of the sitting room, under Dad’s ancient A–Z. It has a terrible pattern on the cover: a sort of Pollock-esque 1980s mess in purple and black swirls – like a bad nightclub – and the 90s was about the last time anyone opened it. Dad and I don’t do photographs, for obvious reasons.

‘What are you up to?’ asks Dad. He ‘oofs’ down in his chair, stretches his legs out to the footstool and plonks his feet on top.

‘Getting the old photo album down. Angela wants a picture from it. She rang last week – in the early hours, one night.’

‘Ah, right,’ says Dad. ‘The photo album. Is she going to phone back?’

‘I expect so, as she missed you. You know you could always phone her,’ I add. Like many men, including those who make a million phone calls a day for work, Dad has an aversion to instigating family calls – and I’m not bloody phoning her. It’s twelve years since Angela last came to London and we’ve only seen her three times in total since she absconded. She flew over for Papa’s funeral in 1998, two nights only, and for Nonna’s, arriving on Millennium Eve, because the flights were cheaper, and returning three days later, then she and Warren came in 2006 for two weeks in the summer – they stayed at the Travelodge in Marylebone and spent most of their time at the Tower of London and Madame fucking Tussauds. But even when I do spend time with my sister, we end up rowing over stupid things, like sisters who don’t like each other very much do.

‘She’ll phone back. Bring the photo album over here,’ Dad says, slapping his knee. I’m surprised. He never asks for it. ‘I used to know the first ten or fifteen pages of it by heart.’

‘Really?’ I ask. ‘You want it?’

‘Yes. You can start going out all the time … I can ask for the photo album.’

I come and perch on Dad’s footstool and place the album on his knees. He peels open the front cover and traces his hand over the first page and the photos clamped into place under their plastic sheet. I watch as his fingers navigate one of those satisfying bubbles.