As I turn the corner at the end of the street I see her. I blink. It’s definitely her. My mother. For sure. She looks different, but it’s her. She’s wearing a little green hat and lots of make-up and a natty little black suit jacket and jeans. She looks all dressed up for a … well, for a date.

Uh-oh.

A fever strikes me – I must save her from whatever she has got herself into. With that dreadful life guru or any other opportunist on a heartless dating site.

I think about shouting to her, but then I think, no, don’t. I follow her.

I have to make sure she doesn’t end up catfished or dogfished or kidnapped or shown floor plans of someone’s prospective flat.

I follow her, down street after street, until we end up at a tiny theatre in the West End. Funny time for a matinee. She goes inside. But something’s not right. The theatre looks dead. No one is around. What kind of pervert attacks a middle-aged woman in an empty theatre? I guess that’s the problem with the internet. The fetishes are infinite. There’s a fetish for everything. Even middle-aged women in empty theatres.

I hear muffled voices, and then my mother’s voice – easier to pick out the words of that one, attuned as I am to it. I pick up my pace – quietly, quietly as I can – down the corridor.

She says, ‘I’ll just get straight on with it then, shall I?’

And then I hear Art’s voice.

Art’s.

I reach the main auditorium and peek inside. My mother is standing on the stage looking forward, her clothes off and thrown in a lump on the floor. I make myself flat as I can against the wall and look through the sides of my eyes.

Art is moving around, stalking and shooting, with his camera. People are moving beside him – hair, make-up, people holding lights and reflectors. Everyone is looking at my mother as she poses there, naked – oh god, naked – on this stage in the middle of London. My mother: the Greatest Show on Earth.

‘That’s really great, Carmen,’ Art says. ‘Just a little more of the leg, of the stretch marks. This piece is all about those beautiful lines.’

‘These things!’

And then I see her – Suzy – next to Art. Standing there like it’s just normal to be someone I am obsessed with standing next to my ex. The world is turning in on itself, and also exploding. I flatten myself more against the wall.

Suzy says: ‘You grew too quick!’

And my mother – MY MOTHER – replies: ‘I shrank too quick.’

‘Because you grew too quick,’ Suzy says.

My mother is contorting herself into various unrecognisable poses – not of humans but of writhing insects or swarming reptiles. I can’t bear to watch. But I do.