‘You and Angela as babies,’ Dad says, lowering his face as though he can see the photographs, and yes, here we are, sitting on blankets in the tiny garden of our first childhood home, in Clerkenwell, toothlessly grinning from highchairs, sleeping in carry cots … Angela looks cute; I wince at the sight of me and that thing on my face. I hope Dad doesn’t know these photos off by heart. I hope, somehow, he has forgotten the blighted baby, that he doesn’t see the birthmark when he thinks of me. But how could he not? How could he ever imagine a ‘me’ without it being there?

I keep on turning. Here’s Dad with his foot on a spade in the tiny garden, triumphantly holding a turnip aloft. All three of us laughing under a crocheted blanket with Nana Larry in her front room; Dad pushing me in a wheelbarrow down some random hill; Angela and I in Southend, standing in front of a scary moving waxwork where a cowering man looks like he’s permanently going to get his head chopped off – huge lemon Rossi ice creams covering half our faces.

‘Is that one with us in Southend still in here, the one with the giant ice creams?’ Dad asks.

‘Yes, it’s still here.’

‘Which one?’ asks Dad.

I take his forefinger and trace it over the photo. ‘I remember it,’ he says. ‘I remember the taste of that lemon ice cream.’

I carry on turning the pages. There’s Angela and I, in red and grey uniform, on Angela’s first day at school – she’s grinning and looking all cheeky; I am perfecting a grimace and look pissed off. Angela dressed as the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz for a Halloween disco. Me, coming down the road on my bike, chubby in knee-high socks and a Wombles T-shirt.

‘Which ones are you on now?’

‘Photos of Angela and me, a bit older. Do you remember her as the Tin Man?’

‘If she only had a heart,’ says Dad, and it’s a joke but kind of true all the same. I like this, I think, us talking about these photos. It’s surprising, but I like it.