‘Don’t be daft,’ I said. ‘Stay where you are.’

I reached for a box of tissues, slightly squashed from when Noah had tried to karate chop it in half, and passed it to Clio, who plucked one out and blew her nose in a most unladylike manner that made me laugh, but I tried to stifle it so she didn’t think badly of me. For some reason that I couldn’t understand at the time, I really wanted her to like me.

‘I’m not normally like this,’ said Clio, screwing the tissue into a ball and thrusting it into her jeans pocket. ‘My father died unexpectedly a few weeks ago. That’s why I’m here, I suppose. It was he that brought us, my brother and me, to Whitley Bay. I just wanted to be in a place that I went to with him. Silly really.’

‘My mum died,’ I said, pleased to have found some common ground with Clio even if it was us both having a dead parent. ‘Not recently,’ I continued. ‘It was years ago, but a thing like that can spin you off track. It took me quite a while to find my way again.’ My mind bounced to Poppy upstairs, the happy result of my spinning off track. ‘But I got there in the end. I’m sure you will too,’ I added. Although I had nothing at all to base this judgement on, somehow it felt true.

‘Your mother?’ said Clio. ‘How awful for you. That must have been dreadful.’

‘I’ve had better times,’ I said with a shrug. ‘But I survived.’

Clio nodded like she was making a decision to start moving on from her father’s death there and then.

‘God, how very morbid of me,’ she said, looking up at the ceiling and blinking away the remaining tears. Then a picture on the wall caught her eye. ‘Is that the Maldives? I love the Maldives. Which island is it?’

My insides clenched. She looked a bit harder but then when she realised that it wasn’t a photo at all but a picture cut from a magazine she looked a little embarrassed. She’s going to think I’m a right idiot, I thought. I mean, who frames pictures of places they’ve never been to? But I did. And I swapped them every couple of months. It was like a travel agent’s on my living room wall, a tick list of the places that I was going to visit when . . . When what? When the kids grew up and left home? When I won the lottery? When hell froze over?

‘It’s Velassaru,’ I said. I felt my head cock to one side ready to challenge her if she took the mick, even though I really didn’t want to come across that way, but she didn’t seem at all thrown by it.