Every member of the older generation who owns property has the potential to purchase part of the younger who doesn’t. Perhaps it has always been this way. The young people dream of collaboration or revenge. Legal documents set out the niceties of the tension. Until recently I owned nothing, and my half-share of an inherited and what appears to be unsellable terrace in a half-alive northern town has not shaken my allegiance with the squatters in this city. These are the people who still talk to me, the ones who live in dilapidated hospitals and office blocks awaiting destruction. I have walked to their bedrooms through dark corridors in decaying horrorscapes like the scariest levels of Resident Evil. It’s true, perhaps, that except for my sweet nature I don’t have much to offer my younger friends. That one day they will decide I have been irresponsible with my opportunities, and judge me for this.

*

The last time I saw Amy before she disappeared was at Christmas, which we spent alone together at Mum’s house, ours now, on the Lancashire coast where we grew up, this town from where trawlers used to set out into the North Atlantic, until we were banned from fishing there by the European Economic Community after the Cod Wars in the 1970s. Hard to mourn the end of overfishing. But someone had to.

At the very end of 2015, my sister and I managed three days of peace together before the Argument, and the Argument didn’t feel so different from the arguments we had had before, maybe different in scale but not in kind, but then… how many more can we have until our desire to avoid them leads us to avoid each other completely? The situation was difficult for both of us. We wandered around, double-jumpered, being as stingy with the heating as Mum had always been, picking up ornaments and putting them back down, finding a quiddity in them that they had never had before. They were ours now. We looked out of the window at the spot where her car wasn’t parked.

One evening we started to discuss what we would do with her furniture if we ever managed to sell the house. Amy owns two flats of her own and is always looking for new places to buy, renovate and sell on. This gives her a certain brusqueness when such matters are discussed. I was reluctant to follow her instructions and begin to list things on eBay.

‘Don’t tell me I’m insensitive,’ she said. ‘I’m being practical. You’re being sentimental. And lazy. When did you even speak to Mum anyway?’

‘On Sundays.’

‘Sundays? I spoke to her all the time.’

‘Does that make you better than me, because you rang her up all the time to moan about your life?’