As I speed over the suspension bridge — too fast, too fast — towards the M5, panic grabs my bowels. The enclosure of a car always makes me more aware of silence. Trucks and lorries thunder past as I join the motorway, throwing up slush-spray from the drizzle that has become snow, and I can’t hear them. If only I could sing to myself, shout my disapproval of the Blind Man, if I could whistle, or mutter and hear the self-righteous cant of my own voice. Instead I put the Jeep in fifth and hit ninety-five and what is left of my heart rises into my mouth. I’m alone and the silence defeats me, because no matter what I say it will pass unheard.

Snow begins to pile on the grass verges of narrow, mud-runnelled Devon roads off the motorway. I recognise nothing and I stop on a night-dark road and watch the flakes fall in the funnel of my headlights. How can I be lost? A man with two dogs walks towards me, snow dusting his shoulders and I lower the window and call out to him. He ignores me and turns away, hurrying down a lane. My heart begins to pump with anxiety. I sit in the driver’s seat as snow gathers on the lip of the windscreen, piling up on the wipers, and wonder how I have arrived here, on an empty road in Devon, alone. This is not what I wanted. I look over to the passenger seat, where Sonja should be, and see a pair of her gloves stuffed carelessly on the shelf. I pick them up and smell the leather but there’s nothing of Sonja in them. I feel as alone as I did when my mother left me at the gates of the school in Exeter and walked away.

Often, when I think of my mother, I think of how she was that day we watched the World Cup Final in a flat in Earl’s Court, a Dusty Springfield record playing in the hallway, her cracked, soaring voice being drowned out by shouts. My mother wore a dark blue sleeveless dress, her hair short and dyed black. Men and women drifted towards her, not knowing why. She spent the day drinking and flirting, touching people’s arms and hands. I remember her laughing, throwing back her head so that her neck stretched for ever and laughing. She came over to me often that day, stroked my hair, asked if I was all right, and I always smiled and said yes, because I was so proud of her, so proud of the fact that everyone wanted her, wanted to be near her. When the match was over, when Bobby Moore held the trophy aloft as if it was the head of the German nation, I leaned out of the window and watched the crowds weaving between cars and waving scarves, the drivers hooting their horns creating wave on wave of noise. (That’s another loop I play in my mind: the sound of celebration.) Then the TV was turned off and the party-began. Still Dusty crooned and my mother slipped off her shoes and danced, gin and tonic in one hand, black and gold Sobranie in the other, as men moved towards her and tried to join her in her orbit but somehow she always managed to slip away. When that summer’s night finally came — the sounds from the street still falling in the open windows - people were sprawled on the carpet, on sofas, and my mother pulled me on to her lap to hug me. I was eight years old and I wanted to squirm away and to stay with her for ever. She smelt of smoke and perfume, her breath sweet with quinine. She held me and rocked me, singing ‘How Can I Be Sure’ along with Dusty, her voice small, pure and sure in my ear. When the song finished she looked at me and smiled. 'All right, pumpkin?’