I need extra supplies of oxygen to talk about this bit. My lungs feel squeezed of air before I’ve even started. ‘Elaine got pregnant again while still a minor. Almost exactly a year after she’d given me up for adoption, she had my brother Drew. Different dad, also made himself scarce very quickly.’ Time for a joke, to cheer us all up. ‘I mean, no one likes to speak ill of the dead but clearly contraception wasn’t my mother’s strong point. Marion and Trevor went into full doom mode once again – family shame panic – and insisted on another adoption. Elaine was distraught again – and then a miracle happened. Drew was born, Marion took one look at him in the hospital and her heart melted. She couldn’t bear for him to be given away, so she talked Trevor round, and suddenly the family shame didn’t matter any more because everyone loved Drew so much.’

I smile brightly. ‘If you’re wondering whether I was a hideous baby and Drew a cute one, I don’t think so. I’ve seen photos of us both – we look remarkably alike.’

‘Probably a generational thing,’ Simon says. ‘I know my parents wanted a boy. Not me, probably – a different boy.’

I lean forward. ‘Did you just make a joke?’

‘No, I was being serious.’ He looks embarrassed, and seems keen to move briskly on. ‘So your mother kept your brother? He wasn’t adopted?’

‘Nope. Marion did all the childcare, Elaine was free to go about being a teenager, but Cheryl says she wasn’t happy. She adored Drew, but her relief at being able to keep him, and her love for him, only increased the pain of having given me up. And Cheryl says—’

I break off. This is the hardest part to say, as I know from telling Gabe (‘Jesus Christ! What a pair of unmitigated cunts! Isn’t this the perfect opportunity never to see Marion and Trevor again, since they’re also mind-numbingly dull?’) and Liam (‘Families are strange. Are you wearing anything under that?’).

‘Cheryl says Elaine would have ended up hating her parents less if they’d made her give Drew up for adoption too. She’d have been bereft again, and she’d much rather have had Drew than a better opinion of her parents, of course, but … it was the hypocrisy she couldn’t stand: the double standard, and the brick-wall refusal to acknowledge it. Marion wouldn’t accept that it was cruel or wrong in any way to force Elaine to give away one baby then allow her to keep the next purely because she felt instant love for one and not the other. It wasn’t a generational thing or a boy/girl thing. Marion apparently said that she looked down at newborn Drew and he looked up at her with so much love in his eyes that she simply couldn’t go through with the adoption plan.’