‘Try those.’ She handed me some dark green boots and I did as I was told. They were a bit tight but they fitted and I followed her out of the back door. I tried to shut it but it needed a good tug to do so. At the side of the house was a concrete yard with a little tractor and a rusty old wooden trailer stuck in the middle. I’d been expecting the tractor to be much bigger. It was a bit of a let-down.

Maggie explained what had happened, showed me the punctured tyre and the rusted nuts. ‘I need you to jack it up.’ She pointed at a rusty-looking contraption. ‘And you’ll probably have to do the nuts on the wheel too.’ She rubbed her hands over themselves like a miser in a movie. ‘My grip’s not what it once was.’

I had no idea what I was doing but with Maggie’s instructions and help we managed to change the tyre. Although the one she put on looked in almost as bad a state as the one we’d taken off, she said it would be fine until she got the other one repaired.

She slapped me on the back with more force than I’d expected she was capable of. ‘You’ve earned your lunch,’ she said, striding back to the farmhouse.

*

I drank more Coke and watched Maggie serve up a full roast dinner. The last time I ate a roast dinner was when my grandparents last visited and took us to the pub. That was four years ago.

When Maggie was putting some stuff in the sink to soak I took a quick photo on my phone. I wasn’t the sort of person who posted pictures of their food on Instagram but I wanted to capture this. It looked so good.

‘It’s like Christmas dinner,’ I said when she sat down to join me.

She chuckled a gentle tinkle of a laugh. ‘There’s no cranberry or pigs in blankets. You can’t have Christmas dinner without those.’

‘We usually have steak and chips at Christmas.’

‘Oh, well that’s nice too.’ She gave me a tight smile. I got the feeling it was nothing less than turkey and all the trimmings for Maggie.

She was right. Steak was always good but it wasn’t a proper Christmas dinner like this. Christmas in March.

There was a pile of something colourful on my plate. Yellow, pink and purple slices of something familiar. ‘Umm, what is that?’ I asked.