‘Living the life of Riley,’ he said. ‘Or having the time of your life. You can’t have the time of Riley.’

Mum hated being corrected – I inherited this trait from her.

‘Yes, all right, Bill,’ she said.

‘Do you want a cup of tea, Dad?’

‘Yes please, Bean,’ he said, walking into the living room.

‘Gwen’s here,’ Mum said when he’d shut the door.

We went into the kitchen. Gwen was sitting at the table, reading through her notepad with a pen poised in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. She looked up and gave me a reassuringly wide smile.

‘Nina, how are you?’

‘I’m good, thank you, how are you?’

‘Very well. I was just catching up with your mum.’

‘I was telling Gwen about how he’s still getting up in the middle of the night.’

‘Which is very normal at this stage,’ Gwen said. ‘His internal clock will be altered and his sense of time will be all over the place which, as you can imagine, is very confusing. He won’t understand why it’s dark outside when it’s the middle of the night, because he feels like it’s the morning and he’s just woken up.’

‘Yes, which is why he bangs about downstairs every night at three a.m.,’ Mum said.

‘As long as he’s staying in the house,’ I said. ‘Although I appreciate that must be very annoying for you, Mum.’

She nodded gratefully. I’d learnt through Dad’s illness that so often all she needed was acknowledgement of the difficulties she was facing.

‘Are there any other new behaviours that you’d like to talk to me about?’ Gwen asked. ‘How are the imaginings?’

‘They’re about the same,’ Mum said. ‘Most of the time he’s just in a different time, thinking he’s still working or that his mum’s still alive. Occasionally they’re more far-fetched.’

‘I think it’s because of all his reading,’ I said. ‘He’s spent his life immersing himself in other worlds – conjuring images from what he’s read on the page. I’m sure that must have given him a wealth of stories for his mind to draw on.’

‘Absolutely,’ Gwen said. ‘And as we’ve discussed before, if going along with it has a calming effect, then you should absolutely go along with it.’

‘The only problem is,’ Mum said, going to the side table in the kitchen where the phone and a pile of notebooks sat, ‘he’s started marking.’ She opened her page-a-day diary, which was covered in Dad’s handwriting, crosses and ticks.

‘I’ve had an idea,’ I said, putting my handbag on the table and pulling out some old workbooks. ‘I found a few projects from my old pupils when I taught English. I think I could easily find some more. So we can give them to him to mark.’ I looked at Mum, who was clearly uncomfortable at the thought of using props to placate Dad’s imaginings, but wanted to seem calm and cooperative in front of Gwen.

‘Great idea,’ Gwen said, finishing the last of her tea. ‘No harm in trying.’

‘How’s everything else been?’ I asked Mum once Gwen had left.

‘Oh, same old same old. Gloria and I did Pilatus this morning,’ she said.

‘Pilates,’ I corrected. Why did I have to correct her? Would I have done the same to Katherine or Lola? What was it about mothers that lowered a woman’s irritation threshold by a metre just from speaking?

‘Yes, that’s what I said, Pilatus.’

‘And how was it?’

‘It was fine – I mean, I do wonder how much good it does, lying on our backs splaying our legs around every which way with a lashing strap. How are you, darling?’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot.’

‘I’m okay,’ I said.

‘No word, I gather?’

‘Nope, no word, but there we go,’ I said, aggressively stoic. ‘How’s Gloria?’

‘She’s fine, she’s worried about you too. It’s just so strange for our generation. In my day – if you said you were going to be somewhere, you were going to be somewhere. You’d say, “I’ll meet you outside Woolworths at seven,” and if you weren’t outside Woolworths at seven, you’d leave the other person standing in the cold. And it was unthinkable to do that to someone. I blame all this constant communication, everything has become too casual. When we were young, there were no mobiles, no social media, no MyFace,’ she said. I couldn’t be bothered to correct her. ‘So you had to stick to a plan and stand by your word. Where’s the sense of honour gone?’

‘Why were you going on a date to Woolworths?’

‘Fine – you don’t want to listen to me.’

‘No, I do, I do.’

‘All I mean is – I think there is a lack of duty to each other now.’

‘But love shouldn’t be about duty, Mum,’ I said, splashing milk into a cup of tea to make it an exact shade of tawny brown.

She gave a theatrically knowing laugh. ‘A lot of love is about duty, Nina.’ Dad shouted from the living room, asking if I could bring him a glass of water as well as tea. Mum smiled in acknowledgement of his unwitting comic timing. ‘Thank you for today.’

‘My pleasure,’ I said. ‘We had a great time.’

‘Do you want to stay for dinner? I’ve learnt how to make low-carb tagliatelle just from a celeriac and a potato peeler, it’s amazing, you won’t believe it.’

‘I’d love to, but I’ve got a thing tonight.’

‘A date?’ she asked excitedly.

‘No, Mum, not a date.’

‘I’m only teasing. We do a singles night at church, you should come. We need some more heads. They’re dropping like flies at the moment.’

‘You’re doing a lot at church recently,’ I said, taking the tea with one hand and a glass of water with the other.

‘I’m applying to be social secretary.’

‘Do you even believe in God?’

‘You don’t have to believe in God to have a good time,’ she said as we walked into the living room. Dad looked up from his book.

‘You certainly don’t!’ he boomed. I handed him his mug and he pulled himself up in the chair by his elbows.

‘Right, I better go,’ I said, putting a hand on Dad’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. ‘I’ve got a question for you both.’

‘Go on,’ Mum said.

‘What is the most annoying song you think you’ve ever heard?’

They both looked into the middle distance and searched through their invisible Rolodexes.

‘Anything by the Steve Miller Band,’ Mum said.

‘No, not abrasive enough, I need something more universally annoying. Something that would make you prefer to have your ears hacked off with a blunt knife than listen to it.’

‘Little orphan fella,’ Dad said, taking a slurp of his tea.

‘Oliver?’ I asked. He put the mug down and returned his eyes to the book. ‘Do you mean the musical Oliver!?’

‘Little friend of yours. Ginger hair, very shrill. We should have thrown him in a freezing-cold lake, quite frankly, he’s never coming here again.’

‘Friend of mine?’

‘Annie!’ Mum said suddenly. ‘He means Annie. Remember we took you to a production of it one Christmas when you were little and your dad hated the songs so much he left in the first half-hour and waited for us in the foyer with the newspaper.’ Mum was laughing as she recalled the memory, Dad was happily no longer listening.

‘Genius,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

Alma was already at her door when I went upstairs to pick her up at eight. We had organized it the previous week – I told her I’d take her out for dinner wherever she liked, we’d just have to make sure we were out until just before eleven. She answered the door wearing a plum-tinted lipstick and amber perfume.

‘You look lovely,’ I said.

‘I don’t think I have been taken out on a date for about twenty years, Nina,’ she said as she held on to the bannister and walked down the stairs to my flat.

‘Right, hold on one minute.’ I went into the living room where Joe had set up his enormous, cumbersome sound system the day before. I put the Annie soundtrack into the CD drive and turned on the setting that would play the album on a loop, exactly as Joe had instructed me to. The bombastic opening strings and drum of ‘Tomorrow’ reverberated around the room, then the singing began. Nasal, high-pitched wailing and a wobbly vibrato poured out of the towering speakers like a sonic flood. The bones of the flat shuddered from the volume. I winced as I returned to my front door and locked it on my way out.

‘What is that noise?’ Alma said as we descended the stairs to leave the building.

‘It’s the Annie soundtrack. It’s a 1980s musical.’

‘It doesn’t even sound like singing!’

‘I know, it’s perfect, isn’t it?’