They both try and push through the wall and when nothing happens they collapse onto the soft carpet in giggles. Soon her head is swimming in ice cream whirls, making shapes like the silken seashell coverlet she saw in the parents’ bedroom. They giggle and they paw at each other’s faces like kittens and talk a language only the other understands.

Her eyelids flicker, like she might be sick but she doesn’t really mind. Her nerves are all tingly.

‘Smacky pills,’ mumbles Scott.

‘What?’

‘I’m just … Jesus. Ketamine or something.’

She rubs her hands together to send ripples through her.

Out in the bedroom, a girl’s voice. ‘All right you lot, out you go. No one should be in here. It’s my mum and dad’s room.’

Becky and Scott giggle quietly, pressing each other’s fingers to their lips. They aren’t going anywhere.

There is a lot of calling out, a kerfuffle, more shouting: ‘Get a move on, Bento!’ Before silence finally falls outside.

The light is too bright and then it’s out. Maybe she is sick after all. She doesn’t know if she is alone. She drinks because she’s thirsty and forgets she’s swallowing down another sickly sweet alcopop. Her head spins and spins and there is a point where she stops being able to remember images, feelings, anything …

Chapter 12

Becky breathes in the smell of her flat. She feels safe here, cocooned in the familiar furniture-polished, washing-powder-marinated mustiness. It is her refuge from the nagging rawness inside about how she crashed clumsily and painfully out of the bar. Her despairing call to Adam. The identity of the woman on Matthew’s floor. She smothers her feelings of discomfort with the business of doing things, like tamping down a plaster on the sting of freshly scraped skin.

She collects the post from the mat. Does Maisie just step over it? Does she even see it there? She goes to hang her coat and notices that the shelf Adam said he would fix is still sliding toward the floor at a precarious angle, held in place by a single rawlplug. It’s unreasonable to feel annoyed – even though he said he’d mend it, Adam isn’t her carpenter – but she feels it anyway as she adds the task to an already over-long list of things to be resolved and fixed. She wishes she could confidently outsource these tasks to buy herself some space. Wishes she could outsource her feelings.

In the background the comforting and domestic sounds of her kitchen filter through: china plates laid down on a wooden table top, the stiff fridge door suctioned open with might, and the springtime bird sound of Adam and Maisie laid over it all.

Maisie laughs. Becky stops to listen, smiling. Forgetting all the tasks that lie ahead.