She slid down the trunk of the damson tree until she was sitting on the grass. Her bare feet stuck out in front of her, bigger than the stone urn thriving with mint that her mother had now begun to weed as if it were hers. It basically was. One day, Claire thought, one day my father will be dead, he’ll die first, and my mother will come to live in this house with Callum, and that will be what they both want, in their understanding of ‘want’. Dean will sneer at them, but he’ll rely on Callum to do the caring; he’ll only visit every couple of months, when she’s all clean and propped up in her chair, and he won’t chip in unless he’s asked. Years hence.

And Claire – where would she be? She tried to picture herself in this scene: she tried to imagine making tea while her mother held court with a tartan rug across her knees, and Dean dropped the news that at the age of forty-six he had finally fathered a child. But she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t there, or anywhere else. It frightened her that she could see their futures so clearly but could not catch a glimpse of her own. Something was there, waiting for her, beyond the shut piano, in the second room you were not allowed to enter but could only imagine. Whatever it was, was it waiting for her to create it? Or waiting for her to kid herself she had? After all, Dean thought he was the engineer of his own identity. Callum thought he’d turned his back on social convention. What was Claire deluding herself about?

She knew what her mother would say to that – though she’d never use the word ‘deluding’. She’d say that Claire had got the wrong idea about her family. They weren’t dysfunctional. They were ordinary, with an ordinary share of problems, an ordinary share of love. Claire gripped two fistfuls of grass. What if she was the one in trouble? Her brothers were resigned to their lots, and she’d always identified that as the source of their vulnerability; but maybe it was lack of resignation that left you exposed – that gave you this feeling of something vast perpetually being at stake. Callum had never entertained the possibility of existence being other than it was. Dean had never thought beyond simple negation. But Claire had been host and prey to both of those ideas. She was out in Manchester trying to prove them.