‘I could hear Annie downstairs practising her song. She’d been given a solo for the festival despite showing no musical ability whatsoever – presumably it was school policy that every loser was a winner. I listened to her downstairs singing lustily without hitting a note, a song about starving children and fruit salads, as far as I could make out. She was also to be dressed as a banana and hang out in a bunch with some boys behind the grapes. Polly was a dragon fruit, which Annie was a little jealous of – more tropical, more glamorous, I guess. Ness had been roped in to play the piano because the music teacher was ill, so she had been round practising with the girls on our piano. It was a big day in the Mortensen household. And I was going to rise to the challenge. I would go to great efforts to make my family happy. My parenting had been somewhat erratic recently but today I was going to make amends. Mum and Dad were coming to the service. Josh had training after school so would meet us there. Then everyone was going to come round to ours for supper, even Leah, and Poll was going to stay over. We would be one big happy family. All I had to do was make a lasagne.

‘I took a Mother’s Little Helper just to keep on top of things. I carried them around with me in my pockets these days: dressing gown, cardigan, coat, bag – I never knew when I might need one. Before Karl left the house, he made some dig about the state it was in and how long was I going to go on playing the victim? How he would cook and clean when he got back from a marathon day of meetings if I wasn’t up to it. I saw the way he looked at me with a kind of general disappointment but I let it all bounce off my cotton-wool edges. “Great, I’ll leave it for you,” I said. Notice that I still had a little of the old spunk left, Dr. R, a dirty residue of anger nestled deep in my colon to be gobbed out at Karl every now and then.