The car windows saved my mother’s eardrums: they took the force of the blast and imploded with it. She told me once that she lay there, blinded by blood, and heard something of the aftermath. She described it as the dripping of buildings: the fluttering of fragile things, the slump of dangling lumps of concrete, the slithering of broken glass over dust. And it goes on and on. You can, apparently, hear it over the sirens of the emergency services shrieking through the streets, racing to save you. It goes on for hours. There are some objects that are blown apart, some that fly — fire-extinguishers, doors, lift cages and the contents of people’s cars, the contents of their lives. Cases, books, clothes and shoes, briefcases and tool-kits, spare tyres and documents, soft toys, blankets, books, letters and notes. These are the things that slither for hours, fragments of lives slipping through debris.

My mother was trapped by twisted metal, imprisoned by the car she loved, her blood pumping through a hundred deep wounds, blinded by blood, temporarily slightly deafened. She called out to me and of course I didn’t hear her. I know I cried out too. But we couldn’t hear each other. I could smell something sharp and seared, an intense, foul perfume. It was the skin of my inner arm smouldering. My mother thought I was dead and kept struggling with the weight of tons of concrete to come to me, to soothe my way out of this world, whimpering the whole time.

They freed her first, hours later, cut her from the car and put her on a stretcher to take her to the hospital but she raved so long and loud (she had no idea how loudly she was raving) that they tended her there as she waited for me to be released. I was dragged out of my concrete jungle limp, broken and confused. Bloodied and very, very bowed. She says that she looked at my eyes through her slashed lids and knew something was wrong. My eyes were too bright, as if they were compensating for something, roving over the aftermath. We were both yelling incoherently, our lives already changed beyond recognition.

I spent more than a year in Tommy’s. Thirteen months - it was a tenth of my short life. I slept for weeks as the operations and anaesthetics wore off, my young body fighting the damage. And once I had groggily recovered from one operation, I was wheeled into the theatre again, my mind, my body groaning, for yet another. I didn’t see my mother for weeks but they were weeks I didn’t remember.

When she was eventually wheeled on to my ward I didn’t recognise her at first: she was thin and pale, her sad calves sagging on her legs, unused and uncared-for. But it was her face that made me turn my back and face the wall. It was a maze of scars, a pitted landscape of flesh. Her eyebrows were twisted by damage, her mouth rearranged by scissions. My mother had been beautiful and now she looked flayed, so I turned my back and faced the wall. Then I couldn’t even see her asking me questions.