‘Oh, that would be nice, lovey, but I’m going on a coach trip to Hastings.’

I sag a bit more.

‘The weekend after, perhaps?’ she says, cheerfully. ‘I’ve got a chess competition, but that’s only Saturday afternoon. You can have a nice bath or go for a walk along the prom with your mum.’

‘You’ve got a better social life than me,’ I say, and I’m not even joking. Since moving into the sheltered housing complex, she’s been busier than I’ve ever known her. It makes me wonder if she’s been storing all this social energy up for all the years she was married to Grandpa. And then it hits me – she’s lonely.

‘You’re okay, though?’ I ask, concerned.

‘Me? Right as rain.’

‘You’re not – not missing Grandpa too much?’

The last couple of years when he was at home, and the dementia was making it harder and harder for him to manage, had been tough on her. I’d lived there, determined to help as much as I could, especially as Mum had – par for the course with her – checked out and gone travelling with a new boyfriend she’d met. She didn’t really do responsibility. It’s not that she didn’t care, it’s more that she – well, she’s always been sort of focused on herself.

‘No, lovey. I mean I miss him, of course, but he wouldn’t have wanted to carry on like that. It’s a blessing, in a horrible way.’

‘I know.’ I think of Grandpa before, when he was well, pottering around the garden in his slippers and a woolly jumper, dead-heading roses and sorting out the shed that was his pride and joy. I try not to think about him sitting, lost in a world of his own, staring into space for hours on end.

‘Anyway, enough of that. What else is happening with you?’ she asks.

I tell her a slightly filtered version of how it’s really going at work, and how I managed to survive a meeting with a load of important people without screwing it up. I don’t mention Alex, or how I’d taken to sleeping with earplugs in just in case I accidentally overhear him and Emma in the room next to mine, or how I’m grateful for the solid Victorian walls that muffle most of the noise even though they unfortunately make this place freezing cold on days like today.

And then I hang up, because she’s got to get going to her chair yoga class, and I hug my knees and I smile to myself, because somehow, at twenty-nine and seventy-nine, the two of us are doing okay in our new lives.

Chapter Ten: Alex

Chapter Ten

Alex

14th February