The grey, bullet-nosed car with its split windscreen scrunched down the lane running parallel to the creek, swooped round the hairpin of Back Road and groaned up the hill. I remember the whir of tyre rubber, the squeak of the car window being lowered dragging rubber the wrong way, the sound of the gear shaft shifting. Even now I replay my mother’s sneezes, her coughs, the voice of the man in the café where we stopped for bacon butties and tea outside Ilminster. I hear my own voice chattering, although the memory grows hazy, and the music … sad, lonely songs of the early morning, breaking up on the ether. There’s one song I can hear whenever I want because it plays in an endless loop in my memory — after all, it was the last song I ever heard. I don’t even know who sang it — a woman’s voice. The lyrics still make my chin tremble even now. I can conjure the refrain of ‘Is That All There Is?’ sung to a wandering string accompaniment. But what’s the point of finding it? I’ll never be able to hear it again.

My mother and I drove to London, giggling and playing around in the old Morris Minor, singing along to the radio. We were going to sightsee in London and to stay with her friends in Earl’s Court for the weekend, sleeping on a sofa in the same room where I had waited for people’s hearts to stop. The journey to London was a long one then, single-lane roads and small Devon and Somerset towns to be negotiated, and as the dark miles passed I looked out of the window, chewing my lip, still worrying about my heart breaking.

We drove up the A3, through Roehampton and Wandsworth, my mother increasingly unsure in the heavy traffic. She planned to turn over Battersea Bridge but missed it, went over Albert instead, coasted up Oakley Street, her frown deepening, the middle finger of her left hand constantly touching and pushing the choke button. This drove me crazy, this subconscious tic of hers. The only reason she did it was because when I was a young child my idea of a good time was to pull it right out when she wasn’t looking. Even now, twenty-eight years after that day, she still does it. It earths her.

‘Well, well,’ she said, ‘howsabout we go to the multi-storey car park near Gloucester Road? Then I don’t have to bother about the one-way streets around Earl’s Court. We can hop on the tube or a bus, then pick the car up this evening and drive over. What d’you think, pumpkin?’

I hated it when she called me that, and now I would give all I have just to hear the word. ‘OK — as long as we can go on a bus.’ I loved the Routemaster buses, loved swinging on the white spiral plastic-clad poles on the platform, swinging out into London.

‘Hmm. I think I head for Sydney Street.’ She turned right on to King’s Road and I watched the crowds. People shouted across the street, whistled and hummed. The cars hooted, buses rumbled. I was part of the world. Music pumped from clothes shops. I swivelled round to look at the front of a shop where Levi’s jeans hung. I was getting my first pair that day, as my birthday present. A rite of passage — the passage from child to teenager when the cheap, nasty jeans of youth were cast aside and Levi’s replaced them.