It was cold in Bromley Cairn, but not as cold as outside. I closed the door behind me with a loud thump, wincing as the noise echoed up and through the house. Crossing the floor of my room I stopped short.

My memento mori was hung. It no longer stood leaning against the far wall where I had left it, but was hanging there, the centrepiece of the expanse of wall above the old fireplace. Pride of place. It looked magnificent. It looked majestic. It was how it was meant to be, this glorious illustration of the wonder of life and the inevitability of death, hanging central in a room characterised by grandeur and decay. A great big wall dedicated to mortality.

I stared at it for a moment. And then I smiled. After all his superiority about art and culture, after all that, Hessel had understood how important the memento mori was to me. I was genuinely touched that he would go to the effort of coming here in the middle of the night to figure out how to hang it, especially with only the low half-light of the lamp to guide him, especially when Polly was so sick. It was very sweet of him, the cranky old man. I got out my phone and took a snap of it there in the lamplight. It was beautiful.

And then my eyes fell on something. There was something on the mantelpiece beneath the picture. A piece of card or paper, lying flat. It was entirely possible it had been there all along and I hadn’t noticed it until my memento mori was hung. Or perhaps Hessel had left it for me. I crossed the room and picked it up.

It was an old colour photograph. A photograph of a family: a young Hessel and Bette, Hessel posing proudly in front of a new motorbike, and Bette with big late-eighties hair standing off to the side with a young Cathy beside her, a super-blonde girl of six or seven in shorts and T-shirt. And in Cathy’s arms, held up awkwardly towards the camera, a gangly little boy of four or five, leaning forward, smiling out from under a crop of sandy blond hair.

I studied it for a while then put the photo in my pocket along with my phone and then, looking around, turned off the lamp and walked quickly through the dark past the bottom of the stairs and out the door.

Back in bed, in my pyjamas with the fan heater on, trying to warm up deep under the covers, I looked at the picture. It was a puzzle I couldn’t figure out. Maybe a neighbourhood boy? But the way Mum was holding him . . .

I leaned out of bed and put the picture away in my jeans pocket, then got out my phone and brought up the picture I had taken of my memento mori hung on the wall.

At the start of the year I’d become a little bit obsessed with the anatomy and development of the human skull. It was, in my opinion, the most incredible bone in the human body – it had to start small enough to fit through a vagina while safely housing the most complicated object we knew of – the brain – and then it needed to grow. It managed this by actually being twenty-two bones that fused together in squiggly sutures, and by reserving most of the growth for the face part of the skull, the ‘visceral cranium’. A skull was incredible. It reminded me that the thing inside my head was actually a precious object – unparalleled in the known universe. It was so precious it had developed its own ingenious armour, an evolved protection that was incredibly effective against most natural knocks and scrapes. I’d banged on about this so much to Nassim that when he’d seen the memento mori portrait he’d just had to buy it for me.