‘Another stabbing. Couple of Somers Town kids, usual shit. Obviously don’t quote me on that …’

‘Fuck,’ I reply, shaking my head. ‘You’re all right, it’s Sunday, I’m not working. That’s my flat.’ I point to a dark window above the newsagent’s, a boarded-up shop on one side, a kebab shop on the other.

‘Actually, don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back in a minute. I’m just going to get a pad …’

As I walk past the phone box, I flinch at the outline of a ghost-like figure through the glass, but when I look again I see it is my own reflection.

Chapter 13

Gabriela

It is a cliché to say that having a baby changes a person, but the day Sadie was born, Gabriela and Tom became different people.

‘You should rest,’ the midwife said, once the baby had taken her first feed. Gabriela was weak and grateful for the nurse’s capable hands as they stretched towards her, taking Sadie and placing her tiny body in the tiny plastic cot next to the bed, then pushing it towards the pillow end, within easy reach.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to sleep with her next to you?’ Tom asked, and Gabriela was grateful when the midwife interfered.

‘We prefer if the baby stays in the cot. It’s safer that way.’

Gabriela could see that he wanted to argue with her on that point, according to the parenting books on attachment he’d started to read and to cite in the weeks before their daughter arrived, as if it was his body, not hers, she would be attached to.

When Tom disappeared behind the curtain in search of a cup of tea, leaving Gabriela alone with her daughter, she felt like she’d been placed in the middle of the ocean and her life-raft was drifting away from her, the force of the love for her baby and the helplessness she felt in this moment threatening to drown them both, to dice her into pieces of herself that could never be put back together. She felt the severing as a series of sharp stabbing pains in the taxi home from the hospital the day they were discharged, Sadie asleep in the car-seat behind her, the pain slicing at her insides every time they went over a speed bump, serving as a reminder that her body – and her life – were no longer her own.

Whatever scene she had painted in her head of what maternity leave would look like, the image was obscured by Tom’s constant shadow. He didn’t hover over Sadie the way she did, anxiously checking her daughter’s breath on a hand mirror in the middle of the night to make sure she was still alive, but rather he simply couldn’t leave Sadie – or her – alone.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked for the tenth time, the day they were discharged.