Kidnapped by Hades and forced to live half of every year in the Underworld. Proserpina’s mother’s desperate search for her, and their reunion, were the desire and the action that brought spring into the world each year.

TUESDAY

Over breakfast (Ivy scrambled eggs, making a point of using skim milk), Dad tried again. ‘Caleb, even if you don’t have anything to say, I need to talk.’

How could Caleb listen while Dad stole glances at his soft belly, his thick legs, like Caleb was incomprehensible, disgusting? ‘You have to help your team find a good defence story,’ Dad said. ‘And stick to it. Jail time – the Wharton family reputation – is at stake.’

Caleb’s true nature, his impulses, had to be kept under control at all costs. They were destructive.

Dad said they were leaving in an hour, and went upstairs to get dressed.

Caleb was surrounded by books. A lot were about art and history. Had Dad once shared Mum’s interests? He pulled down a volume of mythology. No, it was Mum’s. Divorce was messy. Caleb hadn’t realised their family unit was temporary until it was broken. Mum’s mythology book fell open on a page where Zeus said humans shouldn’t have fire because they’d use it to challenge the gods. In other books, he read of Orlando’s birds, dropping because they’d been snap frozen (not roasted), and John Donne’s imagined sun, menopausal and fading, back in an era that didn’t see the End Times as we do, the sun expanding into a giant that will swallow Earth, a mother who will ultimately consume her child. He read that Kronus’s wife wanted their youngest child to kill his father. Then stopped. He’d read enough. What next?

‘I don’t really write songs,’ Mum told him once. ‘I shape poetry into music.’ Maybe he’d give this a go. He found some lines.

The earth… /From her first beauty becomes less fruitful every day

Summer’s robe grows/ Dusky… like an oft-dyed garment

But he didn’t want to sing these ideas, he wanted to draw them. He returned to his room (at least they hadn’t given that to Ivy’s baby) and sketchbooks.

‘Time to get dressed!’ Dad called.

Caleb put off his drawing and put on his suit. Escape, whether into a song or art, was impossible. Guilt was the only way he could be punished and even then, it wouldn’t make a difference to Sean or to the chew of guilt in Caleb’s own guts. Guilt was a biting bitch Caleb knew (so well, he’d come to consider it his muse), the guiding hand behind his actions and inactions. Caleb needed to feel guilt. It was like pressing a scar. No. More like fingering an open wound. The agony was ecstatic. And it was what he deserved. Guilt was his pressure, his power, his motivation. Also his release.

PHOEBE