‘Why?’

‘Okay, so here’s my theory,’ Lola said, sitting back on to the sofa’s mountain of velvet cushions, clearly delighted that her PhD in dating was finally being put to good use. ‘Men of our generation often disappear once they’ve got a woman to say “I love you” back to them, because it’s almost like they’ve completed a game. Because they’re the first boys who grew up glued to their PlayStations and Game Boys, they weren’t conditioned to develop any sense of honour and duty in adolescence the way our fathers were. PlayStations replaced parenting. They were taught to look for fun, complete the fun, then get to the next level, switch players or try a new game. They need maximum stimulation all the time. “I love you” is the relationship equivalent of Level 17 of Tomb Raider 2 for a lot of millennial men.’

I took a large gulp of Rioja that tasted more sooty than earthy when mixed with the lingering taste of my morning toothpaste. I thought about the hours that I had spent in mine and Joe’s flat with the grey background noise of his football videogame permeating through the walls of the living room, dark with the curtains shut. I thought about Mark passed out in a cupboard and pissing himself in his sleep, while his wife breastfed their newborn baby in the lonely silence of the dawn. I thought about Max playing hide and seek – watching me through a crack in the wall and giggling at my disorientation in the game I didn’t know I was a participant in. I thought about all these men in their thirties – ageing on the outside with receding hairlines and budding haemorrhoids – running around a nursery, picking up and putting down women and wives and babies from an overflowing trunk of toys.

‘Can we talk about something else?’ I said. ‘Literally anything else.’

‘Of course,’ Lola said, giving my knee a squeeze. ‘I think if my split ends get any worse, I’m going to have to throw myself in the River Thames.’

‘Lola.’

‘What?’

‘You can’t think about your split ends that much. Surely they can’t be causing you more than a second’s thought a year?’

‘I do,’ she said, holding the end of her hair between her two fingers and studying the strands forensically. ‘I think about my split ends I would say for thirty-eight minutes every day, mostly on my commute.’

‘How is this still the reality of our lives?’ I said, gulping the rest of my wine in one. ‘Waiting for men to call us and reading our own hair like it’s a book. I feel so grim to be a woman. That’s not how I’m meant to feel.’

‘For God’s sake, Nina. This isn’t about being a woman. Most people are self-obsessed, gender regardless. Most people pretend they care about single-use plastics more than they care about their own split ends, but they don’t. I’m just not scared to be honest about it. And THAT’S feminism.’ She said it with a camp flourish, like it was a gameshow host’s catchphrase. I leant down to put my head in the cradle of my palms and closed my eyes. Lola soothingly played with my ponytail.

‘I know this is so awful right now,’ she said. ‘But you just have to trust me when I say: you shall not pass.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You shall not pass,’ she repeated sagely, giving me a gentle smile.

‘Pass where?’

‘It’s a phrase my mum always used to say to me when I was sad. It means: this will end at some point, then you’ll be happy again.’

‘This too shall pass.’

‘Yes, exactly, it will.’

‘No, that’s what you’re meant to say.’

‘Is it? Why do I know the proverb “You shall not pass”?’

‘It’s not a proverb, it’s what Gandalf says in Lord of the Rings.’

‘That’s it!’ She clicked her fingers, as if finally proven correct.

‘I feel very comforted,’ I said, patting her hand. ‘Thank you.’

When I left Lola’s house in the late afternoon, with a foreign type of hangover from a mid-morning drink, I was ready to go home, turn off my phone and get straight into bed. As I walked to the tube station, the four letters that I increasingly dreaded seeing most on my phone screen appeared: HOME.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Hi, Ninabean. How are you?’

‘Fine. How are you?’

‘I’m okay. Quick one – has Dad called you today?’

‘No, why?’

‘He’s missing.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since this morning.’

‘What time?’

‘About six. I heard the door go, and I assumed he was just going to have a wander about in the garden, so I didn’t bother going to get him.’

‘Why would he be going out to be in the garden? It would have been freezing cold and pitch-black. Why didn’t you stop him?’

‘This is EXACTLY why I didn’t want to call you,’ she squawked. I heard her speak to someone away from the phone’s mouthpiece. I could make out a few spat-out words: ‘Nina’, ‘having a go’, ‘how bloody dare’ and ‘has the nerve’.

‘Mum,’ I said, trying to regain her attention. ‘Mum. MUM.’

‘WHAT?’ she roared.

‘I’ll get on the train and come to you now.’

Gloria answered the door, wearing a grey zip-up hoodie studded in diamanté butterflies. Her overly blow-dried claret-coloured bob was as smooth and bulbous as a conker. She gave me an inappropriately large smile, considering the circumstances of my visit. She was an emotional bollard of a woman, always getting in the way when we were in the middle of a sensitive family situation. When I was in my difficult, argumentative adolescent years, she was constantly at the house collecting all sides of the story like a tabloid reporter. She was in her early sixties, but she still had the air of the all-girls school about her – desperate for gossip, frantic to be the receptacle and dispenser of information in a crisis and strangely fixated on being my mum’s ‘best friend’ like two Year 11s with matching tattoos drawn in marker pen.

‘Nina!’ she said, stretching out her arms and drawing me in for a reluctant hug. ‘How are you?’

‘Worried about Dad,’ I said, unnecessarily.

‘Well – we all are.’

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Would you like a bagel with some sandwich spread?’

‘I’m good, thank you – where’s Mum?’

‘Mandy’s in the kitchen.’

‘Her name isn’t Mandy.’

‘Her name is whatever she wants it to be, sweetheart. It’s Mandy’s right to express herself how she likes, and if that’s with a new name, it’s not our place to dictate to her who we think she is.’ She had obviously spent hour upon hour bitching about me being difficult about ‘the Mandy problem’ with Mum over instant cappuccinos made from packets of powder, winding her up by quoting a life coach.

I went into the living room, where Mum was sitting in the corner of the sofa, holding a mug in one hand and examining her cuticles on the other.

‘Have you called the police?’

‘Of course I’ve called the police.’

‘Have you told them about Dad’s condition?’

‘Yes.’

‘And are they searching for him?’

‘Yes, they’ve made it an urgent case. They’re currently checking with all the hospitals, then if there’s still no sign of him, they’re going to look at local CCTV.’

‘Okay,’ I said, sitting down at the opposite end of the sofa. ‘Well done.’

‘You don’t mean that, you think this is all my fault.’

‘I don’t, Mum, I was just shocked earlier, I didn’t mean it.’

Gloria walked in. ‘What’s this?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘I was just telling her that she made me feel very guilty earlier about Bill going missing.’

‘Yes, it really is just an unfortunate accident, your mum didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘I think what I was trying to say, Gloria,’ I said on a long, patient outbreath, ‘is that we need to look at how we handle and speak to Dad as his condition progresses. We can’t carry on as if everything’s normal, as much as we’d all like to. I think this is the final warning that something has to change.’

Mum was staring ahead blankly at the black TV screen.

‘It’s just such a waste,’ she said.

‘What is?’ I asked.

‘It can all be frozen, it can all be frozen,’ Gloria cooed. She turned to me and spoke in a hushed voice as if Mum couldn’t hear. ‘You mum was meant to be hosting Reading Between the Wines tonight. There was a big group of us who were all meant to come over here and she’d already bought all the food.’

‘Right, so where have we looked so far?’ I said, ignoring Gloria. ‘Have you rung all your friends in the area?’

‘Yes, everyone’s aware of the situation,’ Mum replied.

‘What about the golf club? Maybe he thought there –’

‘We went,’ Gloria butted in. ‘First thing. He wasn’t there but everyone knows to look out for him.’

‘What was the last conversation you had with him? Do you remember what you were talking about last night?’

‘We had an argument. And please don’t have a go at me about it, you have NO idea what it’s been like here, Nina.’

‘What was the argument about?’