Claire’s mother considered the children her main employment, but she had also worked as a palliative care nurse for fifteen years at Leeds General, and later, once Dean had gone to school, she’d worked at the hospice up the road, where she washed and fed and drugged the cancer-wasted, the cancer-betrothed, easing their passage into whatever it was that came next, the nature of which she considered it unprofessional to speculate upon. It was also unprofessional to discuss her work: even after retirement, she kept an impenetrable vault of secrets. If asked about it, she would purse her lips, seeming not to think Claire was fit to hear it, not a reliable keeper of the flame; or as if she suspected some form of prurience. Claire began to suspect prurience in herself. She stopped asking. After that, she was thrown a few scraps, a few tantalising comments, almost as if her mother missed the chance to perform her discretion. Once she had said that sometimes people were in too much pain to die.

Felt is not made in an orderly fashion. It comes into being violently, haphazardly, under duress, with only basic elements – fibres, and soap, and water. You can even forget the soap. Felt is unclean. It’s the snarls in dogs’ coats that the vet shaves off. It’s the mats that form in the back of your hair where it rubs against the pillow when you’re fucking.

Once Claire dreamed that she and Callum were lovers. In the gloom of the bedroom at the back of their parents’ house, they held one another. She had looked at his face so long as a child, she could see it as a lover might, magnified and flushed. The heavy goose-down duvet smothering them was soaked with the anxiety sweat of furtive sex. His eyes, without glasses, were obscene.

She had woken up shaken and defiled. It wasn’t just that her brain had concocted such a scenario, in such oppressive detail. It was that the scenario had, in a sense, happened. She felt as if it had. She possessed a memory of it. And hadn’t the psychic materials that went into making it up been harvested from something real?

Also in the dream: her mother’s footsteps on the landing outside the door, prowling somehow, leaning in, weighing up whether to intrude … The prospect of her discovering them had been the worst element of all. Claire could take her own shame, but not her mother’s.

In the morning, Callum looked exactly the same, drained and bleary, as if he hadn’t slept at all. He started fumbling with the toaster and putting pots of jam on the table.