It was always bittersweet for Piper to be back in New Brighton. The memories started to overwhelm her before she even got there. The view of the river from the train. The train announcements, in fact. Even the fabric of the seats. And the distinctive soft plastic smell. Like doll heads. Piper still had no idea what it was.

The station hadn’t changed at all – well, they were repairing the loos and so there were a couple of portable toilets outside – but other than that, it was the same as it had always been. Piper could picture herself there as a toddler, holding her parents’ hands. She’d left a Beanie Baby on the train once and her dad had brought her back to the station to ask if anyone had handed it in. They hadn’t. She’d cried all the way home, up on her dad’s shoulders, wiping her snotty fingers in his hair.

But she had to stop thinking about that. Since her parents had died, she’d found the only way to get through these visits was to aggressively push them out of her mind. La la la, everything was fine. They were away on holiday – no, that didn’t work – they were just… not here right now. Not gone forever.

She walked along Wellington Road, glancing out over the tops of the houses at the river. It looked calm today. And blue. It didn’t always look blue. When she turned up Albion Street, she realised that the enormous hotel that had stood on the corner for her entire life was gone, replaced by a square block of ‘luxury flats’. She’d only gone to that hotel once, for someone’s wedding reception. The daughter of one of her parents’ friends, maybe. She didn’t remember much about it. But still. It was a place that held memories of her parents –her dad standing outside with a cigarette, her mum turning to smile at her as she piled her plate with ham at the buffet – and now it was gone. She knew this was going to happen more and more as time passed. But she hated it.

---

‘Connie?’ Piper called, barging the sticky front door with her shoulder. Her aunt had buzzed her in downstairs, so couldn’t she have opened the actual door to the flat? ‘Are you home?’

‘Of course I’m home,’ she heard from the kitchen. ‘Where else would I be?’

‘Out?’ Piper mumbled, under her breath. She knew better than to actually argue about it. Her aunt’s dog, Buster, came skidding down the hall, wriggling with excitement.

‘Take him on the balcony!’ Connie shouted. ‘Before he pees!’

Piper dropped her bag just behind the door and picked Buster up, jogging through the living room to the tiny balcony. As soon as his paws touched tile, Buster let go, looking up at Piper with a distinctly shame-faced expression as a puddle spread under him.

‘You are ridiculous,’ Piper said, scratching him between his ears. Now that the imminent pee danger had passed, Piper returned to the door and picked up her bag. The narrow hallway had been redecorated since Piper had last been home – there was a huge mirror on one side, reflecting the framed photos of family on the other. Piper glanced at the reflection of the pictures, but didn’t linger, heading for the kitchen instead. Her aunt was standing at the sink, elbows deep in soapy water, despite the fact there was a small dishwasher right next to her.

‘Did you make it?’ she asked.

‘Just about. He needs a nappy.’

‘Sorry I can’t hug you,’ Connie said, nodding at the sink.

‘I can hug you though.’ Piper walked up behind her aunt and looped her arms around her waist, resting her chin on her aunt’s shoulder. She felt even thinner than last time she’d seen her, but she smelled the same as she always had: 4711 Cologne and talc.

‘I’m fine,’ Connie said. ‘Don’t fuss.’

‘I’m not fussing,’ Piper said. ‘I’m hugging you.’

‘There’s individual trifles in the fridge,’ Connie said.

‘I’m okay,’ Piper said, crossing the kitchen to flick on the kettle. ‘I had something on the train.’

‘Later then?’ Connie shook her hands – a cloud of dish foam flying up in the air and then settling on the taps – and peeled off her bright yellow washing-up gloves. ‘They’re low fat.’

If they were the same low-fat trifles Connie had given Piper last time she was home, they were basically a chemical weapon: Piper had taken a mouthful then spat it out into a tissue. Buster had licked the pot clean.

‘Train okay?’

‘Fine, yeah.’ Piper took two mugs down from the cupboard. ‘You having tea?’

‘I will,’ Connie said. ‘Thanks. Where’s your bag?’

‘There.’ Piper gestured over her shoulder to her bag on one of the dining chairs.

‘So you’re not staying long then?’

‘Just tonight,’ Piper said. ‘I’ve got to be back at work Monday morning.’ She was sure she’d told her that on the phone on Friday evening when she’d finally responded to one of Piper’s messages.

‘Only a bit of a milk for me,’ Connie said, as Piper opened the fridge. ‘Do you like this colour on the walls? I’m not sure about it.’

Piper hadn’t even noticed it was different. It was pale blue now. She had no idea what colour it had been before.

‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘And the hall looks good.’

‘I could do without seeing my face every time I come in or go out,’ Connie said, on her way out of the kitchen.

As Piper finished making the tea, she listened to her aunt take her bag through to the second bedroom, make her way to the lounge, turn the TV on and off again and then draw a curtain. Piper smiled to herself. She might move house, she might lose weight, but Connie never really changed.

‘How long are you staying?’ Connie asked, as Piper put the mugs of tea down on the coffee table, before immediately crossing the room to look at the view.

‘Just tonight,’ Piper said. ‘Like I said.’

Between visits, Piper always forgot how her aunt never really listened. Whenever they talked on the phone, Connie told her the same stories, but Piper figured it was because she couldn’t remember if she’d told her the last time. Or if it was Piper she’d told or one of her friends. But in person, it was because Connie was constantly distracted. By the dog, or some random bit of housework she’d missed.

Right on cue, Connie tutted and crossed the room to pick something up that Piper couldn’t even see. And then she disappeared in the kitchen to, Piper assumed, throw it away. And wipe up whatever tea-making trail Piper had left behind, invisible to any eye other than her aunt’s.

After her uncle Graeme had died, Piper had accompanied Connie on the house hunt. Or, rather, flat hunt. Connie had put their house – the house they’d lived in for the whole of their twenty-five years of marriage – on the market only a couple of weeks after Uncle Graeme’s funeral. She’d said she couldn’t stand to be there without him. Piper had worried at the time that it was too hasty, that she’d regret it, but she never had seemed to. She’d seemed comfortable here right from the start.

Once she’d actually bought the place anyway. The first time they’d come to look, Piper had loved it instantly. It was cosy, but roomy, on a lovely street and high enough for river views. Piper immediately pictured herself on the balcony with a coffee in the morning, a glass of wine in the evening. But Connie hadn’t been sure. She’d worried about it being an upstairs flat – even though she’d already rejected all the downstairs flats they’d seen. She’d said the balcony was wasteful. And she didn’t like the street because years ago an old boyfriend had lived there and she thought it had given him ‘airs’.

‘Look at that view!’ Piper had said, over and over.

‘I don’t need a view,’ Connie had argued.

Piper had been genuinely worried that Connie wouldn’t actually buy it. That she’d go for the tiny place over the shop on the main road, which had a terrace, but the whole flat smelled like meat. Or the one bedroom in the mansion block, where Piper would have to sleep on a sofa bed (‘They do very good ones now, apparently.’) But then Connie had phoned her and told her she’d already put an offer in and it had been accepted, and she expected Piper to come up and help her pack and then move and then unpack ‘since you love the place so much’. And Piper had. And she did love the place. So much. So much, in fact, that she’d actually vaguely thought about buying it if Connie hadn’t. For an investment. God knows, everyone had told her she should put her parents’ money into property.

And then she’d laughed at herself. As if she’d move back home. As if she’d leave London. As if she’d spend the money her parents had left her on returning to the town she couldn’t wait to get away from. As if.

‘There was a seal in there the other day,’ Connie said from the sofa.

‘Where?’ Piper turned, but didn’t move from the window.

‘Marine Lake. Got separated from its family, apparently. Confused. Washed up here.’

‘What happened to it?’

Piper braced herself to learn that it had died in some horrible way, but no.

‘RSPB came for it,’ Connie said. ‘No. Not RSPB. The other one.’

‘RSPCA?’

‘That’s it. They gave it a stupid name and took it away to recover. It was on the local news.’

Piper pictured it, all big-eyed and sad. She’d have to g

oogle it later. She sat down next to her aunt.

‘So. How are you feeling?’

‘I saw you on that show, you know?’

Piper bit her lip. She hadn’t even considered that Connie would have watched it. She’d never expressed any interest in Piper’s blog; in fact Piper had often wondered if Connie had forgotten about it entirely, even though she’d told her about it more than once.

‘You did very well, I thought.’

Piper smiled, picking up her tea. ‘Thank you.’

‘That other woman was a right bitch.’

Piper was glad she hadn’t drunk any of her tea. Connie would not have taken kindly to a spit take. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use that word before!’

‘I usually say “female dog”, ’ Connie said. ‘But I didn’t think it was strong enough this time. Who does she think she is?! I said to Gra—’ She stopped. Stared at her tea. Picked the teaspoon out of the sugar bowl and stirred it again. ‘I thought the presenter woman should have told her off.’

Piper didn’t miss the cut-off mention of Graeme, but she got it. She did the same thing all the time: picked up the phone to call her mum, got excited when she saw Foo Fighters, her dad’s favourite band, were touring and started to wonder if they could actually go and see them together or if it would be a bit weird because she and her dad didn’t usually do much just the two of them, before remembering. Connie didn’t really talk about them. She wasn’t actually Piper’s aunt, she was her mum’s aunt, but she’d always been Aunty Connie because Great Aunty Connie was too much. Piper’s mum had always been closer to Connie than to her own mum, who’d moved to Mallorca in the eighties and never came home. The funeral had been the first time the rest of the family – tiny as it was – had seen her for years.

Piper would be lying if she said she wasn’t relieved that Connie didn’t want to talk about them. Any of them. Piper could talk about it, and she had. To Matt, to friends, even to the bereavement counsellor everyone had told her she should see (she’d gone once, cried solidly for forty-five minutes, and had never gone back), but she didn’t need to be talking about them all the time. Particularly not here, when the memories were already overwhelming. (Another plus for Connie’s new flat was that there were no memories of her parents there; she didn’t have to worry about being ambushed. Apart from the photos, and she could avoid them.)

‘Anyway,’ Connie said now. ‘I thought you did very well. Jenny thought so too. You know, in the pub?’

Piper nodded, even though she wasn’t quite sure which one of Connie’s friends Jenny was. ‘She’s been doing Slimming World. She’s lost two and a half stone.’

‘Oh,’ Piper said. That was plenty.

‘Have you ever tried that one?’ Connie said.

‘No,’ Piper said. ‘I don’t diet.’

‘Oh no, I know,’ her aunt said. ‘I was just thinking maybe you could try it.’

That was another thing about her aunt that Piper always forgot.