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swoop in and then out, and I feel quite sick. I try to focus on something outside my body. I’m looking at her painting. It has always been here so I hardly see it now. But it is actually a fantastic bright picture, in greys and blues, of Brighton pier – the living one – with waves crashing towards the eye and white foam flying up, alight with sun. I make myself breathe in and out.
    â€˜Are you OK?’
    Alice is off the phone now.
    â€˜I was,’ I take another big breath, ‘just thinking about the PBJs – the cling film. And the sellotape – all the sellotape she used when she posted things … ’ Alice sits down, heavily, next to me. We look at each other and then we both start to cry. We grip each other’s forearms and crumple.
    â€˜Mamamama!’ Finn sings. He bashes his cup on the highchair. ‘Maaaaamaaa. Mammam!’ I push back my hair as it is coming loose, and I wipe at my face with the backs of my hands. Alice does the same and we both turn blotchy smiles on him.
    â€˜Alish?’ He flashes her his best grin. He has always, practically from the moment they first met, seen Alice as a personal challenge. He can feel both her unease and her adoration, and makes a point of offering her his most irresistible smiles.
    Alice wipes her eyes, gets up and runs a hand gently over his hair.
    He stuffs some more toast into his mouth.
    She bends down and smiles at his level. He offers her some chewed toast and Marmite, crushed in his fist. ‘Oh yum,’ she says, pretending to take a bite. He thrusts it closer, leaving Marmite on her reddened nose.
    *
    A white knitted square lies on the bottom of my mother’s jewellery box. I pick it up and pricks of light shine through the fine stitches. I turn it over. Embroidered, in blue thread, is a curling
K
.
    My heart turns over again: so she did keep a treasure from my babyhood. There is a box of Alice’s baby things in the attic, but I didn’t realize she had kept anything at all of mine when we left California. Gently, I lay the blanket fragment next to the box.
    There is just one more thing now – a flat, grey stone, about the size of my thumb, and heart-shaped. It is smooth and almost weightless. I try to imagine my father giving itto her on a Californian beach at sunset, all those years ago, when they met and fell in love. Before he betrayed her.
    But this scenario feels unlikely. I can’t actually imagine my father picking out heart-shaped stones on beaches. He doesn’t belong on beaches at all, or in the Californian sun. He belongs in chilly northern cities, weaving through magisterial buildings in well-cut trousers, noting angles and lines with his architect’s eye.
    Alice leans over and pokes at the carving with an index finger. ‘What
is
that thing?’ She still has a smear of Marmite on her nose, and for a second I want to reach out and hold onto my little sister. I want to stroke her hair and tell her that everything will be all right and that this grief won’t always be so intense. Maybe things will be more straightforward between us now we don’t have our mother to contend with. But this is not the way it works with us. The way it works is that Alice is sensible and holds everything together. She gets to worry about me, but I don’t get to worry about her. I can’t comfort her, even though, when she was little and had hurt herself, I’d be the one she’d run to first. But that all shifted as we got older, and my relationship with our mother deteriorated, and Alice became the peacekeeper, the smoother-over, the organizer.
    She turns away now, and pours herself another coffee.
    â€˜Alice?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜I’m sorry that I’ve been so crap, and I didn’t come, and you had to take all the strain of her illness, and everything. I’m really sorry I haven’t been here.’
    â€˜Oh, right. No.