‘You don’t know anything about my life, Minnie, and this whole hard-done-by working-class routine is deeply unattractive.’

‘I don’t need you to find me attractive,’ said Minnie.

‘I think you’d better go,’ Quinn told her for the second time in their short acquaintance. ‘Try not to smash anything on your way out.’

New Year’s Day 2001

Quinn sat on the bottom stair picking at the chipped varnish covering the crack in the banister. In the blue house, the banisters snaked up from the bottom floor four and a half whole turns. If Quinn lay on the floor in the hall and looked up, he couldn’t see where the banister ended; he liked to imagine the curling wood went on and on, winding upwards like Jack’s beanstalk to the castle in the clouds, or – in this case – to the attic. When he was little he used to try climbing to the top without touching the stairs – the carpet was lava and the banisters were safe. He had to get to the top to rescue his sister from the evil tribe who lived in the attic, threatening to throw her into the fearsome volcano.

He’d made it as far as the second floor, balancing his feet on the thin rail of wood, holding on to the railing above before he’d slipped and fallen down arm first onto the banister below. He’d broken his arm and taken this chunk out of the wood. It had only been a small chunk, but his father had gone ballistic.

‘That banister is irreplaceable! It’s carved from a single piece of oak!’

‘What were you thinking? What were you doing?’ cried his mother, crouching down to Quinn’s level, blue eyes blinking wildly, her blonde hair rolled in curlers and black streaks running down her cheeks. The spiders that lived on her eyelids looked as though they were melting.

‘Rescuing my sister from the attic,’ Quinn said, through breathy sobs.

His mother’s face turned white; she covered her mouth with a hand, pushed him away and fled back upstairs, taking them two at a time.

It was Daddy who had taken him to hospital. Quinn remembered because it was the first time he’d been allowed to sit in the front seat of his father’s convertible. Daddy couldn’t work out the car-seat straps in Mummy’s Volvo, so they went in his car, which didn’t have a car seat or a roof. ‘Don’t scuff the leather with your feet,’ his father instructed. Quinn didn’t have any shoes on because his father hadn’t known where they were kept and Quinn was crying too much to tell him. That was years ago. Daddy didn’t live with them in the blue house any more.