She tests the limits of her peace. She finds she can pad about her room without tripping her inner alarms. No thought intrudes besides the observation, This is beautiful as she runs her hand over walls. So smooth. So carefully built. There is so little in her room. Nothing one might damage oneself with, if one had a mind to, so no mirror, no pictures, no sharp-cornered furniture. But what does one need besides a quiet cube of air, white walls, a bed to lie upon? And a window. Secured it may be, coated and unsmashable, but it gives her the world.

The wide-armed cedar has seen so many drugged-up people, taking a turn in their plain white pyjamas, staring at a grass blade as though it might cut them, or the sky as though it will fall on their heads. And all these years the tree has reached out to embrace them.

Birds. A flight of starlings on their way to somewhere warmer, more generous with insects, finer for breeding; all of them magnetized, each to the other. When she was at university, there was a place they would gather in the evenings, over the old pier. They would swoop and curve, iron filings drawn by a magnet in the hands of an invisible artist: no sense to their movement but beauty. Nothing in its purpose but joy, a ballet of birds practising their flow and connection, as the sun sank towards the horizon satisfied that nothing it could illuminate would surpass this miraculous dance.

And hinted in the window, people. A road that will soon bear cars, its tarmac laid over the hill like a discarded necktie, marker of desire. Its route determined centuries ago by communal longing; scored into the earth by the tramping of feet that chose this one same way to go. Later, rutted by the wheels of carts, and later still, when mud clagged business and ruts damaged profits, laid with stones. Finally, soothed with tarmac. And a thought surfaces. Human beings are astonishing. They are not thoughtless apes. Nothing like. Apes are still collecting leaves to make nests in their jungles. Using sticks to winkle termites from tree bark. But humans have invented cities, cars, fridges, aeroplanes, laptops; they’ve sent submarines down to the ocean floor and rockets into space. Made something you can carry in your pocket that lets you access the infinitely expanding knowledge of the entire world – or call your mother and say you’ll be late for tea.

April cannot call her mother. There would be paperwork to do. And she doesn’t want to. Words ran out between them long before April blew up the bus. She learned her silence under the carpet-bombing campaign of her mother’s tongue.

We never bonded, her mother had said to the latest set of Liquid Supper friends, nine-year-old April gangling in the doorway. Did we, Mischief?

I wasn’t there.