“You should come!” she exclaimed one morning.

“Mum, you know I don’t believe in that crap.”

“Always good to get a bit of humility in your life; good to connect with a higher power!”

This doesn’t have to mean Jesus. If Karen was born in Israel or Indonesia, Thailand or Japan, she would be as happy connecting with Buddha or an ancestral spirit as with any Christian deity; the point is the turning up, not details.

Harmony finds these things frustrating, hypocritical and trite.

If she had to sum her mother up in three words, it would probably be those.

And yet she sleeps in her childhood bed and eats her mother’s pasta and knows that without this, she would be damned.

Sometimes she wishes her mum would ask for rent.

Sometimes she wishes her mum would call her a loser. Then she could be hurt, and cry, and know that her mum didn’t understand and didn’t love her, and then Karen would be mortified, struck down with guilt and they could call each other names and say how fucking stupid they both were and that would be better. That would be, perhaps, a different kind of easy from this polite, unquestioning support; this generosity without complaint that was slowly, inexorably, driving Harmony mad.

She picked her mum up after church on Sunday. That was the compromise they agreed on. Sometimes she wondered if her mum wanted to come so she could show her off, if Karen was proud of her, wanted everyone else to see her wonderful, beautiful daughter.

But then she looked at herself in the mirror, thirty-one, fat, ugly, living at home and working in a stationery shop, and could not conceive of any force so powerful that it could possibly love or be proud of her.

Sometimes they just went home. Sometimes – most of the time – they went to the shops to pick up a little something for supper. Sometimes – rarely – they went to the pub with a couple of the old farts from the church, and Bill who ran the scouts, and Morris who was big into amateur dramatics, and was going to be in a show at the local theatre for a couple of nights playing a butler.

“Is it a big part?” Karen asked, and he would humbly reply, “We’re an ensemble company,” which everyone thought sounded very impressive, and Harmony suspected meant he didn’t have any lines.

This weekend, they walked together round the duck pond just to the south of the church, where the old men sat with young boys fishing between the trees, and the grass was mown to a perfect sheet behind a sign that read “PRIVATE LAND – NO TRESPASSING!” before erupting upwards in a sea of stalks and spiny yellow limbs along a perfect line decided by she knew not what gardener a long time ago.

A heron watched the world suspiciously from the edge of the muddy water. A pair of ducks snapped irritably at each other, before one lost patience and scampered for the sky. On the far edge of the green, a row of little houses ran in perfect ticker-tape order, matching windows and matching doors, matching gardens and matching walls.