As I clean the glass in my bright home, the stale smell of alcohol recreates a dark memory of my grandparents’ home, which was all the darker the last time I visited it, and sat in a dirty bedroom while my grandmother lay like a grotesque monarch and devoured the chocolates we had brought. I probably knew then that soon she would be dying. Our Boxing Day routine was over; and now it seems impossible that the grinning lady in the photograph and the gorging monarch were part of the same life, or that either was ever alive at all.