Page 101 of The Spark

I frown. ‘Ash is a good person. I can’t lie to him like that.’

‘You really think you’re going to find a scientist or doctor who can prove your theory?’

‘I might.’

‘Well, if you do, remember to check their alma mater isn’t the University of WTF.’

I recoil slightly. ‘Okay . . . I will?’

She shuts her eyes briefly. ‘Sorry. I’m tired. Sorry. Look – in the nicest possible way, maybe before you try to find a doctor or a scientist, you should talk to a counsellor.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’ I feel faintly nauseous at the thought of being confirmed mad, instead of it merely being suspected. I set down my drink. ‘Anyway, are you okay? You hardly ate.’

When we lived together, we used to have a league table of the best Sunday roasts in Norwich, pinned up on a piece of graph paper in the living room. It was Jamie’s thing, really, because Lara and I were usually too hard up to buy lunch out. But he liked to treat us.

She wrinkles her nose. ‘Just knackered.’

‘You do look a bit translucent.’

She smiles faintly. ‘And you look like a person with a broken heart.’

‘I’d like to come and see your mum.’ I’m not too sure how Corinne feels about me these days, given I blanked her daughter for nearly a decade, blamed her for Jamie’s death and failed to be there when Billy died. I’m not sure I’d want to see me, if I were Corinne.

‘She’d love that,’ Lara says. ‘She always adored you, Neve. That never changed.’

‘Work’s going to be a bit full on this week, but... next weekend?’

‘Any time. Whenever. You know you’re always welcome.’ She reaches for my hand and squeezes it hard, in a way that feels like she is trying to tell me something.

‘Lar. Is she dying?’ The thought is almost unbearable, even as I’m saying it out loud. It hasn’t occurred to me before now – I’ve been so caught up in my own problems. But now that I think about it, why else would Lara have taken extended leave from work to move back to Norwich and help out for so long?

But Lara just smiles weakly. ‘Christ, let’s hope not.’

That night, I head to Mum’s. The house is freezing, and she’s tucked up in the living room beneath a blanket, a glass of something amber-coloured in her hand. She’s watching Strictly Come Dancing. It’s one of her favourite programmes, because some guy once told her she had the rhythm to make it as a dancer. Despite this clearly being a line to get her into bed, she’s never forgotten it, and enjoys behaving every year like she’s judge number five.

‘Oh,’ she says, glancing up as I come in. ‘Thought you were Ralph.’

I’m surprised to see she’s sitting on a new, crushed-velvet silver sofa. ‘Mum. What’s this?’

‘Strictly. It hasn’t been very good this year. Aren’t they supposed to be celebrities?’

‘Not the TV. The sofa.’

She smiles and strokes it with one hand. ‘Someone at the pub was selling it. And my old one had all those broken springs, so I thought, why not.’

‘How much?’

‘Couple of hundred quid.’

‘Mum, I could have got you a gorgeous sofa.’

‘What’s wrong with this one?’

Perhaps she’s seen a version of it on Bev’s Instagram. When Bev got a leopard-print beach cover-up, Mum started wearing an identical one, for pottering round the house. And when Bev dropped the name of her collagen-retinol-whatever night cream, a pot of it showed up in Mum’s bathroom the following week. ‘It doesn’t really... go, does it?’

She surveys the room and shrugs. ‘Go with what?’

Fair point. This room is a mishmash of peeling William Morris wallpaper, a peach deep-pile carpet straight out of the 1970s and some wonky white flatpack furniture. Not for the first time, I wonder if my dream of restoring this house together will ever actually happen. Mum just doesn’t view it in the same way I do. Its character and charm completely pass her by.

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