His mother had been pretty, girlish and had liked to dance; Merrill was handsome and acted lady-like. She called his father Jonathan, for example, when everybody knew his name was Johnny, and he was different when he was with her – there were not so many jokes. His dad had always been naturally funny, but there was nothing natural to Merrill, and her increasing presence worried Bobby.

She also tried to tell Vanetta what to do, which wasn’t right at all. Vanetta took it in her stride, he supposed, but he couldn’t believe she liked it. And Lily didn’t help – she was arguing with Vanetta these days, being downright rude, about when she would go out and when she’d see her friends and how much time she could spend on the phone even though she hadn’t done her homework.

‘She’s just being a teenager,’ Vanetta had explained to his father, when Lily was giving him a hard time too, but Bobby was apprehensive nonetheless and didn’t like the arguments.

When Vanetta asked her to do something, Lily would say, ‘Don’t boss me.’

‘Child, I’m not asking you anything your father don’t want you to do. If you wants to make a fuss, make it with him.’

And Lily would roll her eyes and sigh.

He figured as long as Merrill didn’t actually live there he was safe. He wished instead that Vanetta could live with them. Or at the very least be there more of the time – especially weekends, when there were just the four Danzigers stuck in this dark apartment, especially during winter. They seemed never to go out; the only expedition was on Saturday morning when his father took him (Mike and Lily always turning down the privilege) along for the weekly shop. He said he needed help, but Bobby knew he needed company.

Yet how could his father be lonely? There didn’t seem any need for his father to see Merrill. He had his children, didn’t he? – and his friends, and Uncle Larry and Aunt ZZ. And Vanetta as the lynchpin for life in this apartment. Yet there was his father finding company with Merrill, some lady who lived in the Cloisters, a vast armoury-shaped apartment building, which Bobby passed each morning with his father on the way to school.

His father, bizarrely, seemed concerned that Bobby was lonely too. One day Bobby heard him and Vanetta talking in the kitchen while he stood in the doorway to the long hall; they must have thought he was back watching Superman on TV.

‘How’s our little guy doing, V?’

‘He’s okay, Mr Danziger. Time helps, you know.’

‘It will be four years next fall.’

‘Yes, sir, though he’s still got to be missing his mother.’

‘I know.’

Vanetta said, ‘He be doin’ okay. But that’s one deep boy, Mr D.’

His father laughed but there was a melancholy strain to it.

‘I tell you one thing,’ Vanetta offered. ‘He could do with some company his own age.’

‘I know, but he’s got Lily and Mike. They’re nice to him, aren’t they?’

‘They’re okay. But they’re so much older that they won’t play with him, except when I ask them to.’ Vanetta said ‘ask’ like the word ‘axe’; Bobby had corrected her once, and she had said thank you. But she continued to say ‘axe’.

His father must have been frowning, for Vanetta added, ‘It’s only natural, Mr D. Kids like to play with kids their own age.’

Had anyone but Vanetta said this, Bobby would have felt betrayed. What she didn’t understand was that he was happy with the way things were. He knew his mother was gone for good, he did his best quite faithfully to remember her, staring at the photograph his father kept on top of his roll-top desk, trying to match the picture with some image in his head, and he knew too that something hard, and awful, and enduring had happened to them all.

But the terrible thing he couldn’t admit even to himself was that he didn’t actually miss his mother much; he had trouble enough just remembering her. And with this secret came another one he kept to himself. As far as Bobby was concerned, Vanetta was his mother.

There was actually plenty of company in the apartment, even if it wasn’t of his own age. Like Mike D’Amico with his grocery deliveries twice a week; he’d sit down sometimes and have a cup of coffee, especially if Vanetta needed time to go around the kitchen and sort out what they needed – the potatoes were in the pantry, but the fruit was on a shelf near the icebox, and the veg was in the icebox itself.

Or Mr Tipps, a white Southerner who at Merrill’s instigation (according to Mike) repainted the entire apartment, and would take a break in the kitchen in the late afternoon, where he would explain to Vanetta and Bobby how man had descended from the coconut. ‘Just look at one,’ he’d say, tugging on a strap of his painter’s overalls. ‘Two eyes and hair just like a man’s.’

On the ground floor, below their apartment, lived the Edeveks – Eddie, the janitor, and his wife. You had to be careful about jumping around in the living room or dining room, since they were directly below. But in the back bedroom there was no problem, since it was just the cavernous basement beneath.