‘She will! That’s the point of all this shit! This is like when I accidentally liked one of Art’s ex’s pictures and I had to change my whole handle and profile name for a week so she didn’t know it was me and I still worry about the fact she will have looked back and realised at a later point. I have inherited your incriminating sausage fingers!’

I take my phone back and click it to sleep. I drink my Bramble, severely anguished.

‘Don’t worry,’ my mother says. ‘Seriously, darling. Your so-called Suzy Brambles is one big construct.’

‘Don’t say her name.’

‘Come on,’ my mother says. ‘Sup up.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘All my old haunts. Some fresh air. Some perspective. You wonder why you’re anxious – when you constantly stare at a device that beams nightmares into your eyes. Enough 2D.’

‘It’s not what it was, Soho,’ I tell her, as we walk.

‘What, sleazy and dirty?’

‘Affordable.’

‘I don’t think it was ever that. But I did go to some great parties in flats around here.’

Then, ‘Slow down,’ my mother says. ‘Slow down.’

I slow down.

‘Have you ever strolled around Soho?’ my mother asks. ‘I don’t mean dashed between meetings – I mean just allowed yourself to dawdle, on these streets? Have you ever really looked up at these buildings?’ she says, raising a bowled palm to the sky, like Hamlet.

‘I don’t know. I suppose not.’

‘Have you had a cigarette in Soho Square and not spent the whole time looking at your phone? No? I thought as much.’

We head for the square, find a bench and sit in silence. The square chatters and tinkles around us. I itch to look at my phone, but I resist.

‘Should have got Linda to do us a carry-out,’ my mother says.

I look at the almost-bare trees. The last leaves flutter in the wind. I’m not normally an alfresco person but I think you can occasionally commune with nature if the conditions are right and you’re miserable enough. I’ve had a few ‘moments’ with rats, foxes and squirrels: eye contact, each other’s focus for a brief second. I even had a mini-thing with a Canada goose once, but I think it was possibly brain-damaged.

Straight after our moment it flew into a railing.

When we get home, she runs me a bath. Blobs of lavender and rose oil bob around the top. I sit and try to let my body soften in the water but then a big gob of period comes out. I watch it unfurl between my legs, like a brown fern. It turns the whole bath brackish.