‘Danny says he hypnotised Annette,’ I said. ‘Made her think she was late for school.’

Mum screwed her face up. ‘That was a bit mean of him,’ she said.

‘Was she late for school?’ my dad asked, missing the point, as usual, by about twenty-five metres.

Chris pulled a face at me, but I turned the other cheek and ignored him.

‘The point is that she must have been hypnotised,’ I said.

Blank looks from Mum and Dad said I needed to explain a little further.

‘It’s the summer holidays,’ I said. ‘You don’t get ready for school when there’s no school to go to.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Dad said.

‘And it was night time,’ I finished.

Mum was looking over at Dad with one of the strange expressions that had become all too frequent in our house.

Even the simplest, most innocent statements could be met with tension, with Mum and Dad always on the lookout for traps and pitfalls in everything said within the walls of the house.

Because, I guess, they spent so much of their time setting them for each other.

This is a portrait of the Straker family before the talent show.

So, when things get crazy you have a suitable base for comparison.

You see, Mum and Dad were ‘having problems’, and were ‘trying to make a go of things’. Both of those phrases, it turns out, are a sort of grown-up code for ‘their marriage was in trouble’.

My dad had left us almost a year before, and he’d only come back a couple of months ago.

Anyway, to trim a long story not quite so long, Mum couldn’t cope when he was away. And so I stepped in to help her. I became the honorary ‘man’ of the family, with responsibilities that I really didn’t want or need placed upon my shoulders.