The picture chosen for the front is all wrong. It’s Mum with Dad, taken back when Ross and I were young. She is, already, fading. They should’ve used that photo from the mantelpiece at home: black-and-white, late teens, Karen Carpenter hair, everything still an option; when you’ve made no choices, none of them have had the chance to be wrong. She sparkles with life in that picture. When my time’s up, I’ll be wanting a picture of that afternoon on the Thames in ’95 to be remembered by. Before the lengthy business of dying began. When I was all cause, no effect.
