Al’s twenty-five, she’s from Croydon and she works in a call centre. She used to have a brother called Tommy but he died in a motorbike accident when he was eighteen and she was fifteen. She feels really guilty about it because she came out to their parents the day before and they reacted really badly so she ran away. Tommy went after her but he was driving too fast and was hit by a car pulling out from a T-junction. They took him to hospital and, for a while, they thought he might pull through, but it wasn’t to be. He spoke his last words to Al – ‘I’ll always love you, sis’ – and that means a lot to her. She’s quite a spiritual person in her own way – she believes in ghosts and psychics – but she’s very dismissive about organised religion and even yoga and meditation, which she thinks is ‘hippy bullshit’ (sorry, I’m sure you can convince her otherwise!).

My other friend is Daisy. I think you’ll love her! She’s twenty-five, too, and she’s the poshest person I’ve ever met. Like Al, she’s lost a sibling – that was the thing that really drew them to each other, when they realised they’d both suffered a loss – but her situation was very different. She was five when her one-year-old sister Melody died. They were sharing a bath together and her mum popped out of the room to get a towel from the laundry basket in the master bedroom. I don’t know what happened. Sometimes, when she’s drunk, Daisy says that Melody reached for a toy on the other side of the bath and slipped and banged her head on the taps and fell into the water. Sometimes she says she was trying to teach Melody how to swim underwater and she didn’t realise her sister had stopped holding her breath. Sometimes she says she got out of the bath to try and find her mum, and when they returned, they found Melody face down. I think that, deep down, Daisy does know what happened to Melody but she’s fabricated different scenarios either to assuage her guilt or increase it. As if what happened wasn’t terrible enough, her mother blamed her for Melody’s death. She accused Daisy of being jealous of the new baby and deliberately hurting her. Six months later, Daisy’s mum killed herself. I don’t know why but I can’t help thinking that, deep down, Daisy’s always blamed herself for that, too. Oh, Isaac, it’s so heartbreaking. To meet Daisy you’d never know she’d been through something so awful. She’s so cheery and full of life but she’s carrying a terrible burden.