A shape, a shade, comes forward into the kitchen. He expects it to be his father, but it is his mother, shuffling, in a bathrobe, yet erect and moving. She leans forward unsmiling to accept his kiss. Her wrinkled cheek is warm; he hand steadying itself on his wrist is knobbed and cold.

‘Happy birthday, Mom.’ He hugs the massager against his chest; it is too early to offer it. She stares at the package as if he has put a shield between them.

‘I’m sixty-five,’ she says, groping for phrases, so that her sentences end in the middle. ‘When I was twenty. I told my boyfriend I wanted to be shot. When I was thirty.’ It is not so much the strange tremulous attempt of her lips to close upon a thought as the accompanying stare, an unblinking ungathering gaze into space that lifts her eyes out of any flow and frightens Rabbit with a sense of ultimate blindness, of a blackboard from which they will all be wiped clean.

‘You told Pop this?’

‘Not your dad. Another. I didn’t meet your dad till later. This other one, I’m glad. He’s not here to see me now.’