‘It’s not working, Yaya,’ Tommy says after some minutes. ‘Mr Sunshine doesn’t want to come out today.’

‘I think you may be right, Tommy. He overdid it yesterday.’

‘Oh well.’ He drops his imaginary broom, kicks it, picks Herbie’s wet lead off the sand. ‘Come on, let’s go. Yaya, can we get some fishies and food for Hewbie? He says he’s hungry too.’

‘Yes, of course, let’s all go to the supermarket and get some of our favourite treats.’ As I say this, the thought of Tesco with its fluorescent lights flickering overhead, the long aisles stacked with all kinds of dead animal, makes my eyesight blur and my breath come short and sharp. A fluttering starts high in my chest and I rest my hand on it, trying to make the winged creatures settle. I can do this, it is necessary, it is normal, I must do this. I’m grateful for the rain that has decided just at this moment to fall on us: it dampens the wings, weighs them down. My boy raises his face to the sky and licks the drops as they fall. ‘Will there be a storm, Yaya?’ He loves storms, like me, loves the thrill of thunder, his tiny body rocking to the bass notes, his eyes fixing on the flashes of lightning. I think of the early-summer storm of three months ago when the two of us flew out the front door to the green and danced barefoot, bodies swaying, chasing the flashes, willing the lightning to come find us. Herbie stayed by the back door, whining.

‘Last one to the car is a pooper,’ I say, running in my bare feet, flip-flops in hand.

‘Pooper scooper…’ he sings, laughing.

In the car we play the game of ‘colours’. Any colour we see we have to describe in terms of something else. Tommy started this one himself accidentally – when I asked him to name all the colours he could see inside and outside the car, he started by saying: the colour of snot and grasshoppers, yuck, the colour of the sea on a sunshiny day, the colour of the sky on a cloudy day, the colour of Herbie’s eyes, the colour of rain, the colour of Yaya’s hair, the colour of Yaya’s happy. What he is actually seeing as he says this, I can’t imagine. ‘What is it, Tommy? What do you see? Is it that seagull?’ ‘The colour of ice cream,’ he says.

We pull into the Tesco car park, which is teeming with shiny, glossy four-by-fours and Volvos, most with registration plates no more than five years old. I count, obsessively: none are as old as mine, pushing fifteen years and way past its NCT date. Heat rises in me as I drive to a faraway corner, hidden, camouflaged by bushes, so no one else can see the moss that has incubated in the windows, the rust that is ingrained in the scratches. Try not to think of the vintage Spider my Italian fling, Roberto, the rising film director, bought me for my twenty-fifth birthday. ‘A thing of beauty for a great beauty,’ he said, framing me with his hands. What would he make of me now? Harsh, soundless laughter rises.