‘I don’t know how to start. She was decent and self-sacrificing. That’s not interesting, is it? If she was uptight it was only about the unimportant things. The little worries. She was open-minded. Thought for herself. Didn’t perform the expected emotions. Forgiving. Anti-establishment. When I was fifteen and on study leave for my GCSEs we all went round to a mate’s house for a party while his parents were at work, and I put on one of his dad’s suits to go to the off-licence and buy booze for us all. You know, seventeen cans of Stella, five cans of cider, three bottles of Mad Dog Twenty-Twenty kiwi flavour – a standard office party. The police picked me up on the way back and I got suspended. The policeman came over that night to see Mum. I don’t know where my dad was. The policeman started to lecture me. “You know what you’ve done,” he said. “You’ve destroyed the trust between you and your mother.” “No, he hasn’t,” Mum said. “Let’s keep things in perspective.” She was loyal to me and Amy. He’d brought the carrier bags of booze over with him. “Would you like me to destroy these?” he asked. “ No,” she said. “We’ll do that for you.” The look on his face. You don’t realise what it’s like to have someone who’s always on your side until you don’t any more…’

I spoke about her for a while and then Mary told me about her friend who had died in the cycle accident. She showed me Instagram photos of them riding mopeds around a Greek island, and I pretended I hadn’t already looked at them. I was touched by the way they publicly adored each other. Mary’s last post on Facebook was the funeral arrangements for her friend, in a church in a village in Norfolk.

‘I lied about my friend dying,’ I said to her. ‘When we first met. I didn’t have a friend who died.’

Her head was on my shoulder and I was stroking her hair. She looked up at me, confused. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Oh, nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

We must have fallen asleep then. I woke up in the night with my arms around Mary and didn’t know who she was at first. Then I woke up in the morning and she was gone.

‌

‌Nineteen

We talk about my mother. We talk about my father. The tissue box stays unused. I know I’m being a poor sport here.

‘How would people describe you, do you think?’ you ask.

‘It depends which people,’ I say.

‘Colleagues, friends, family.’

‘They’d… I’d hope they’d say I was kind, sympathetic, honest.’

‘Honest?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because you seem to relish telling me about your slippery behaviour with Emily and Andrew.’