The next day, Freddie and Jenny headed to Sal’s house to start on the cleaning.

‘So, what, we get the furniture sorted first? We won’t have time to do the carpets.’ Freddie puffed beneath his bin bags. ‘We’ll need a proper cleaning service to do them I think.’

‘No, Kathleen said that Maraid will lend us her Vax.’

Freddie thought of the state of the carpets. He wasn’t sure a Vax would do it either.

Jenny had been skittish all morning. The sleepless shadows beneath her eyes gave her a haunted look. She drank a few sips of coffee, put the mug down, forgot it, and made another, forgot that too. They stopped in the village shop on the way to the house, and Jenny spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the relative effectiveness of various cleaning products, insisting that they get new scrubbers, bleach, stain remover, while Freddie hovered behind her, his face creased with concern. When it came to pay, she realised that she’d come out without her purse, so Freddie had to buy it all, packing the bags while Jenny kept up her rambling monologue on what to clean and how to do it, and the woman on the till looked on with an uneasy sympathy, eventually offering shy condolences.

‘I was very sorry to hear about Sal,’ she said, stopping Jenny in mid flow. ‘She was a lovely woman. We used to see a lot of her. Before the stroke, you know.’

There was an awkward pause. ‘Thank you,’ Jenny mumbled.

‘If there’s anything I can do?’

Jenny smiled crookedly. ‘Well, if she ran up a gin bill, you could write it off. That’d help.’

The woman’s face froze in confusion. Freddie winced. Jenny seemed to come to a little. She shook her head in a dazed way, as if she was shaking off a cloud of flies.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. If there is a bill, then of course I’ll—’

‘There’s no bill,’ the woman told her. Confused disapproval flowed from her every pore.

Freddie took Jenny by the elbow, and together they walked slowly, and in silence now, towards the estate. At the bend in the road, she stopped like a stalled horse.

‘We’ll do as much as you can stand, OK? It’ll be all right. Just let me know when you’ve had enough, and we’ll go home, OK?’ Freddie told her.

Despite standing empty for only two days, the house smelled neglected and damp. The glasses were still on the floor; the sticky kitchen table was now covered with a thin patina of dust. Freddie walked ahead of Jenny, an advance guard, while she hung back by the door. She only came into the room fully when Freddie crunched one boot on the glass that still littered the stairs.

‘Here, pick up the bigger bits and we’ll wrap them in newspaper,’ she told him. ‘Watch it, though, because it’s all over the stairs.’

‘What happened?’ Freddie picked up the photo, shook it free of glass, and pulled one shard out of infant Jenny’s face.

‘Accident, that’s all.’ Jenny was picking up splinters, her fingers drifting over the blood on the carpet. ‘She knocked it off going up the stairs.’

‘What about the blood?’

‘That’s mine. I tried to clean it up, but I got sidetracked getting her to bed and—’ She showed him a half-healed cut on one thumb.

‘OK then, I’ll clean this up,’ Freddie said eventually.

‘No. No, I’ll do it.’

And, still without looking at him, she plunged her hand into the shopping bag.

‘No, Jen, not that!’ Freddie grabbed at it. ‘It’s spray bleach. You need the stain remover.’ She didn’t let go, though, and her face, behind her loose hair, seemed set in a snarl. He almost recoiled. ‘Jen – let me do this, come on.’

‘No. I’m fine. I can do it.’

‘For sure, but not with bleach.’ He leaned down to look into her eyes. ‘You’re not OK.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re not though.’ He led her stiffly to the kitchen. ‘Look, you make a start in here and I’ll – deal with the stairs. OK?’

She nodded, took a shuddery breath. From her coat pocket, her phone rang. ‘Missed it.’ She looked at the screen, pale and tired. ‘Kathleen. I’ll go outside to call her. She can be funny about people overhearing her on the phone.’

She wasn’t outside for long, and from what Freddie could see, Kathleen did most of the talking, while Jenny answered only: ‘Yes, yes, of course, yes.’

She came back into the kitchen and shrugged her coat off.

‘Everything OK?’

‘Yup.’ She kept her head down, and grabbed a handful of scrubbers with one shaking hand.

‘You’re sure?’ Freddie asked. ‘You don’t look like everything’s OK. Did she upset you?’

‘She said that Maraid will only lend me the Vax if I give her the telly and the nest of tables.’

‘Are you kidding me?’ Freddie was all indignance. ‘She’s family, for God’s sake! I mean—’ The sight of Jenny’s strained, pale face stopped him. ‘That’s bullshit, though. Really.’

Jenny made a shaky, vague gesture. ‘Families. That’s just what she’s like. I’m not going to argue with her about it, I don’t have the energy. Plus she scares the shit out of me, Maraid.’

‘But, it’s your mum’s stuff, I mean, by rights it’s yours, surely—’

‘I don’t want any of her stuff!’ Jenny cried, almost savagely. ‘It’s all… shit. It’s all cheap shit!’

‘Babe – sit down.’

‘No. I just want to get on with the cleaning now.’ That rage had left her voice, left her weakened, grim. ‘Let’s just do that, shall we? Make a start anyway.’

‘Do you want me to call Kathleen back? I mean—’

‘God no!’ Jenny said. ‘She’d kill me if you did that. No, I’ll just let her have the TV. It’d only remind me of Mum anyway. I don’t want to argue about it. Right. You do the stairs, and I’ll start in here.’ She moved briskly to the sink.

‘Take it easy though, will you?’ Freddie hovered behind her. ‘Any time you need to stop, just stop, OK?’

And so Freddie spent the half hour carefully spraying and dabbing at the blood on the wall, which he soon had down to a pastel smear. The carpet cleaner, driven into the cheap shallow weave, fizzed pinkly with dissolving blood. From the kitchen he heard the scrape of crockery being dragged out of cupboards, the splash and gurgle of water in the sink.

All morning they scrubbed and dusted and aired the place out, until their eyes and fingers stung with bleach, and the scent of lemons drove out the cigarettes.

By early afternoon they stood on the cusp of Sal’s bedroom, spooked as children.

‘I can do this for you,’ Freddie told her.

Jenny let out air through pursed lips. ‘No. I’m not going to be a pussy about this.’ She took one determined step into the room. Then another. Then stopped. ‘I can still feel my mum. Isn’t that weird?’ She looked over her shoulder at Freddie. ‘I keep imagining she’s in the next room. Andreena told me the other day that when her mum died she saw her afterwards. Just walking around her house. Behind her in the mirror.’

‘God, that’s creepy!’ Freddie shuddered.

‘She said it was a nice thing, like her mum was telling her that everything was all right, that she needn’t feel bad. She said she saw her on and off for a whole year, until she stopped grieving and accepted what’d happened.’ She turned around fully to face him. ‘You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?’

‘Not really.’

‘Me neither,’ Jenny replied. There was a pause. On the bed, a gaudy flowered wrap lay spreadeagled, it’s sleeves puffed as if they still held phantom limbs. ‘Look at that. She loved that thing. She claimed it was silk. It’s not though. It’s only polyester.’

‘Jen, really, why don’t you let me do this?’

‘No. We’ll do it together.’

‘Or we can come back tomorrow maybe?’

‘No.’ She pulled a bin bag off the roll, a loud rip in the stillness. ‘If you do the wardrobe, I’ll do the chest of drawers, OK?’

‘OK.’ Freddie opened a window a crack to let in some fresh air. In its reflection he watched Jenny hesitantly approaching the bed, placing one spread palm on the gown, letting it hover, and then grasping it suddenly, bagging it up and throwing it into the bag with a grimace.

By 4 p.m. they had stopped for the day.

‘We can go for a drink on the way back if you want?’ Freddie opened the door, peered at the darkening sky. ‘They might still be serving food.’

She followed, hesitated, stopped. ‘No, you know what? I think I’m going to stay here. Just this one night.’

‘What? I don’t think that’s a good idea—’

‘No. I want to. I don’t know why, but I think it’ll help. Honestly.’ She smiled at him. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘OK, I’ll stay with you—’

‘No.’ Jenny was firm, serious. ‘I think I should be on my own for a while.’