Maisie’s friends think her new neighbourhood is awesome. It’s where any number of struggling music producers and would-be fashion moguls have moved, in search of cheap rents while they chase expensive dreams. The neighbourhood is beginning to get written about in those pockets of the internet seemingly made to be unfindable by anyone over the age of twenty-five. To Becky’s eye, these stories are somewhat overselling a remote, scuffed corner of Hackney, where the shops sell milk and noodles and table tennis bats. Still, she has seen octogenarians with hard East End vowels queuing in the post office alongside wasp-waisted girls with nose rings and asymmetric hair, so perhaps it’s true. Or becoming true.

What matters to her is that the flat is hers. There will be no help with the bills here.

She dresses in front of a door-hung mirror.

She looks different to the Becky of a year ago. Her limbs have lost their pale and sinewy skittishness. She has become rosier, rounder, even dimpled in places. She has been cooking, making slow stews and sugar-dusted cakes with which to welcome her daughter home. ‘Like something out of the 1950s,’ says Maisie, only where is the pipe-smoking paterfamilias proudly washing his car in the driveway?

Becky sets out for the first bus stop that she’ll need. The cinema that she is heading to is not the closest cinema, but it’s the nearest one still screening Medea, so it’s where she must go if she wants to catch it on the big screen which, she decided only this morning, is something she wants. She suspects it will hurt, and with further hurts undoubtedly in store for the late afternoon, why not get it all over with? A full day of horrors, but ones she has chosen.

She walks rather than runs now. She has tried running softly and slowly but she can’t connect to this way of moving, not after seventeen years of pushing her body to the point of agony. The urge to burn until she is spent is no longer there. Still, with her newfound ardour for cooking hearty dishes, her jeans were getting tight, and she couldn’t afford a new wardrobe, so she has taken to walking, which is just as well considering the irregularity of the buses.