The bedside tables are vastly different from each other. My father’s side bare except for a small alarm clock and a paperback of A Brief History of Time. My mother’s side is a jumble of things – fashion magazines, an old paperback of a Mills and Boon novel, tissues, more earrings, a hairbrush. I open the bedside drawer and marvel at the tiny pill boxes inside. There is a pill for everything – happiness, sadness, insomnia, exhaustion. It is an apothecary’s chest of drugs and I wonder how she manages to get her hands on them all. Most of them look to be prescription drugs. I pull out one plastic bottle, this one for extreme fatigue according to the label, consider the tiny white pills inside and slip the bottle into my pocket. I also pocket the sleeping pills and anti-depressants. Sometimes I feel sad. These may take the edge off. If they are good enough for my mother, then they should work for me. If they were important, she would’ve taken them with her.

Off the main bedroom with its vast bed is her dressing room and it is a similar picture. One of extravagant chaos as she rifled and discarded items not worthy of ending up in her suitcases. There is something about the decadence of all this that is sitting uneasily with me today. Perhaps because it comes on the back of talking to Tracey with her humble outlook and modest family, but this show of wealth is making me queasy.

Is this what Tracey sees when she looks at me? Is she lying about my worth when she actually sees a spoilt little rich girl in front of her? Is she friends with me only because I am rich?

I open the wardrobes, marvel at the rows of coloured material, hearing the clatter and chink of the empty hangers, naked, their outfits now packed into the underbelly of an aeroplane. One wardrobe is entirely dedicated to my mother’s shoe obsession. On good days, I have seen her teetering about the house in thin heels, leaving little circles of damage on the parquet floor like a breadcrumb trail of her aimless wanderings.