Oliver, Lisa gasped, happiness suddenly slotting into place. I’ll ring him. But the warm honey-tide of good feeling immediately turned to acid. She’d forgotten for a moment. I don’t miss him, she tutored herself. I’m just bored and fed up.

In the end, she rang her mum – probably because it was a Sunday and therefore traditional – but she felt like shit after wards. Especially because Pauline Edwards was desperate to know why Oliver had rung her looking for Lisa’s number in Dublin.

‘We’ve split up.’ Lisa’s stomach snarled into a tight walnut of emotion. She didn’t want to talk about this – and why hadn’t her mum phoned her if she was that concerned? Why did she always have to ring her?

‘But why have you split up, love?’

Lisa still wasn’t exactly sure. ‘It happens,’ she said snippily, desperate to get this dealt with.

‘Have you tried that counselling thingummy?’ Pauline asked tentatively, reluctant to bring the ire of Lisa down on her head.

‘’Course.’ Said with terse impatience. Well, they’d gone for one session, but Lisa had been too busy to go to any more.

‘Will you be getting divorced?’

‘I should think so.’ In fact, Lisa didn’t know. Apart from what they’d yelled at each other in the heat of anger – ‘I’m divorcing you!’ ‘No, you can’t because I’m divorcing you!’ – nothing specific had been discussed. In fact, she and Oliver had barely spoken since the split but, inexplicably, she wanted to hurt her mother by saying it.

Pauline sighed unhappily. Lisa’s big brother Nigel had got divorced five years previously. She’d had her children late in life, and she didn’t understand the ways of their world.

‘They say that two in three marriages end in divorce,’ Pauline acknowledged, and abruptly Lisa wanted to yell that she wouldn’t be getting divorced and that her mum was a horrible old trout to even suggest it.

Pauline’s worry for her daughter wrestled with fear of her. ‘Was it because you were… different?’

‘Different, Mum?’ Lisa was tart.

‘Well, with him being… coloured?’

‘Coloured!’

‘That’s the wrong word,’ Pauline amended hastily, then tentatively tried, ‘Black?’

Lisa clicked her tongue and sighed hard.

‘African-American?’

‘For crying out loud, Mum, he’s English!’ Lisa knew she was being cruel, but it was hard to change the habits of a lifetime.

‘English African-American, then?’ Pauline said desperately. ‘Whatever he is, he’s very nice-looking.’

Pauline said this often to show she wasn’t prejudiced. Though her heart had nearly stopped with fright the first time she’d met Oliver. If only she’d been warned that her daughter’s boyfriend was a hard, gleaming, six-foot-tall black man. Coloured man, African-American man, whatever the correct phrase was. She had nothing against them, it was just the unexpectedness of it.

And once she’d got used to him, she was able to get beyond his colour and see that he really was a nice-looking boy. To put it mildly.

A huge ebony prince, with smooth, lustrous skin pulled tight over slanting cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes and thin, swingy dreadlocks that ended at his jaw-line. He walked as if he was dancing and he smelt of sunshine. Pauline also suspected – though she would never have been able to consciously formulate it – that he was hung like a donkey.

‘Did he meet someone else?’

‘No.’

‘But he might, Lisa love. A nice-looking boy like him.’

‘Fine by me.’ If she said it often enough, it would eventually become true.

‘Won’t you be lonely, love?’

‘I won’t have time to be lonely,’ Lisa snapped. ‘I have a career to think of.’

‘I don’t know why you need a career. I didn’t have one and it didn’t do me any harm.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Lisa said fiercely. ‘You could have done with one after Dad hurt his back and we had to live on his disability.’

‘But money isn’t everything. We were ever so happy.’

‘I wasn’t.’

Pauline lapsed into silence. Lisa could hear her breathing over the phone.

‘I’d best go,’ Pauline eventually said. ‘This must be costing you.’

‘Sorry, Mum,’ Lisa sighed. ‘I didn’t mean it. Did you get that parcel I sent you?’

‘Oh yes,’ Pauline said nervously. ‘The face creams and lipsticks. Very nice, thanks.’

‘Have you used them?’

‘Weeeell –’ Pauline began.

‘You haven’t,’ Lisa accused.

Lisa showered Pauline with expensive perfumes and cosmetics that she got in the course of her job. Desperate for her to have a bit of luxury. But Pauline refused to relinquish her Pond’s and Rimmel products. Once she’d even said, ‘Oh, your things are too good for me, love.’

‘They’re not too good for you,’ Lisa had exploded.

Pauline couldn’t understand Lisa’s rage. All she knew was that she dreaded the days when the postman knocked on her door and said cheerfully, ‘Another parcel from your girl up in London.’ Sooner or later Pauline was always called upon to deliver a progress report.

Unless it was a parcel of books. Lisa used to send her mum review copies of Catherine Cookson and Josephine Cox, in the mistaken belief that she’d love all that rags-to-riches romantic stuff. Until the day Pauline said, ‘That was a terrific book you sent me, love, about that East End villain who used to nail his victims to a pool table.’ It transpired that Lisa’s assistant had mistakenly parcelled up the wrong book, and it marked a new departure in Pauline Edwards’ reading. Now she thrived on gangster biographies and hard-boiled American thrillers, the more torture scenes the better, and someone else’s mum got sent the Catherine Cooksons.

‘I wish you’d come and see us, love. It’s been ages.’

‘Um, yeah,’ Lisa said vaguely. ‘I’ll come soon.’

No fear! With every visit the house she’d grown up in seemed smaller and more shockingly dreary. In the poky little rooms crammed with dirt-cheap furniture, she felt shiny and foreign, with her false nails and glossy leather shoes, uncomfortably aware that her handbag probably cost more than the Dralon couch she was sitting on. But though her mum and dad oohed and aawed respectfully over her fabulousness, they were fluttery-nervous around her.