When was I ever doing something just with Mum? It was Angela who was thick as thieves with Mum, until she left. Angela who cried for her all the time, after she’d left. When she went to Janice’s. When she went on her tour.

When she moved abroad to Sweden, where she’s been since 1984 …

‘Do you miss her?’ asks Angela. She asks me this occasionally. I always say the same thing.

‘No.’

‘Do you ever wonder what she’s doing, over there in Stockholm? How she’s living her life?’

‘No.’

‘I do.’

‘You shouldn’t,’ I say.

1984 was Mum’s first and only visit to The Palladian, but she didn’t come in. She slouched in the doorway unironically wearing her own, brand-new ‘Choose Life’ T-shirt belted over cycling shorts, topped by a curly perm. She’d brought half a packet of Opal Fruits and two Panda Pops and told us she was moving to Sweden, her ancestral home. That she was going to live with her cousin Torge, in Stockholm, the one who sold margarine for a living; that she was going to get a job and try to be a responsible adult.

I was fourteen at the time. I was soon to meet my friend Georgina and go to the fair at Finsbury Park. I had done my spiked hair and high-street make-up but was still in my dressing gown. Dad and I had been dancing to his Roxy Music album, when she rang on the doorbell, my bare feet planted on his slippers and my hands on his shoulders as we danced to ‘Avalon’ in that familiar father–daughter silhouette, although I was far too big for that, really. I answered the door and she said our old neighbours in Clerkenwell had told her where we’d moved to. That she’d come to tell us her news. I invited her in, but I didn’t care that she only slouched in the doorway. I wasn’t interested in her grand plans or her fresh start. I was pretty much over her by then – my heart, weary of her absence, had already formed its crust. Angela came and hugged her, she asked if she would write and Mum said ‘yes’. Then she said she had to go. She had to make preparations; she had to pack. She asked if she could hug me and I said ‘no’, then she adjusted her belt, the buckle of which had swivelled round to the right, patted at her counterfeit curls and left.

‘Definitely take him to Liberty,’ Angela says, as though she hasn’t just thrown the ‘Do you miss her?’ curveball into the conversation, and as though I hadn’t told her Liberty was already on the list. ‘And what about the gates of the Globe Theatre? Or St Paul’s?’ OK, now she was taking over. Why didn’t she come back and do it?

‘Yeah, maybe.’