I rested my forehead on the wood of Robert’s bedroom door and listened. Some music tape he’d bought recently was playing, its beat relentless, the singer’s voice high and beseeching, even though it was a man’s.

Robert, I whispered into the gloss. A glass of coke, my pretext for knocking on his door, was cold and slippery in my fingers.

There was a clunk as the tape finished.

I pushed the handle down and stepped in to find him right there in front of me. We stood for a moment, face to face. He wore the same expression he’d been wearing ever since Kathryn had told him about the change of schools: an unblinking blankness, cheeks smooth, lips straight. It was as if he was utterly bored by everything he saw. Everything in this house, everything I said, everything his mother and I did.

‘I thought you might want a drink,’ I began.

‘I’m going out.’

‘Oh.’ I looked past his shoulder and into his room. It was a shock to realise that I hadn’t been in there for months.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ I said, brushing by him, still holding the coke.

He shrugged, as teenagers are supposed to, and closed the door behind us.

There was a smell in there, a spicy, sweet smell; it was something like marigolds.

I looked around the room. We’d painted it for him a few years ago; everything had to be blue and plain, he was very clear on that particular rule. No patterns. Plain curtains, plain duvet cover. It made his room look a little like the whole thing was underwater, as if he was sleeping in a sea of blue.

Robert remained standing in the doorway, staring at me. His chin was lifted a little, and I recognised the gesture as his mother’s.

I tried not to look at the ring in his ear, but found my eyes fixed on the glinting gold loop. The word gypsy came into my mind again. Whenever she saw a woman in the street with gold hoops through her ears, Mum would nudge me and say, ‘Where’s her crystal ball, then?’ and laugh. Mum never wore earrings. Kathryn has a few pairs, small coloured gems that screw on to her lobes; they’ve always appeared to me to be devices for torture.

I looked away from the earring. In the corner, Robert’s old Midland Bank school bag lay in a crumpled heap.

I pointed to the bag. ‘Is the strap broken?’

He gave another shrug.

‘I could mend it, if you like.’

‘But it’s not broken.’

I put the coke down and flexed my cold hands. On the table beneath his wall mirror (I’d put that table there, with a chair, for his homework), bottles and tubes were lined up, along with two hairbrushes. I wondered why anyone would need more than one hairbrush.