‘Oh great. Geraldine’s great,’ he said. ‘The best.’ And as I turned away to stow my packages in my bag, he added, ‘So you’ve still been studying in the old house?’

I straightened up. ‘Yeah.’

‘And it’s going alright?’

‘Yes. Everything’s fine. Not a single ghost or delinquent.’

‘Okay. Okay. Fair enough. No stairs though, right?’

‘Are you kidding me? Have you seen those stairs? I don’t have a death wish.’

‘Cool. Okay, cool.’

‘You and my grandparents and those bloody stairs . . .’

He turned to leave and then turned half back. ‘So, I guess . . . I guess we’ll see each other around soon then.’

I nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah. I guess we will.’

‘I hope so.’

I blinked. ‘Oh. Okay. Yeah. I mean, me too.’

Basil walked off up the street, and I watched him go. He pirouetted out of the way of a passerby, curtsied to a little girl who curtsied back to him, stopped to chat to a couple of guys his own age sitting on a bench smoking, and then disappeared around the corner with his bags.

I returned to the doctor’s office to find Bette snoozing in the waiting room chair with her head back, and the receptionist waving me over. Dr Geraldine had rung to say she had to stay up at the hospital but that she could reschedule all her clinic appointments for the next day.

‘Oh. Okay,’ I said. ‘I guess I can just bring Bette back tomorrow.’

‘That would be perfect if you could? That would be great. Okay then,’ said the receptionist, clacking away at her keyboard. ‘So. You’re all set for the same time tomorrow. See you then.’ And she beamed at me.

Tomorrow. The package was in my bag. The maxipads were stuffed in on top of it.

What would tomorrow even look like?

*

Bette seemed rejuvenated by her nap in the doctor’s office. By the time I returned to the house after two good hours of study in Bromley Cairn, I found her in the kitchen with various ingredients assembled on the table in front of her – chicken, onion, garlic, curry powder, flour, cream, apples and sultanas.

‘Making something special for you tonight,’ she said.

I immediately recognised the makings of Skip Curry. That was what we’d called it on the unfortunate occasions that Mum had decided to cook when I was a kid. Mum hadn’t made Skip Curry for years. The more high-powered her work became, the less she cooked – she’d become the takeaway queen, leaving the schlepping in the kitchen to Dad. But when I was a kid, some nights she’d make a snap decision to get all ‘mothery’, as she called it, and to cook for her family. But she could only make one thing, this one terrible thing, and it was clear to me now where she had learned to make it: here, in this house, about as far removed from any authentic curry-making experience as you could get. Suddenly the awfulness of Skip Curry made a lot of sense.