‘Mum! Do not speak about Lisa like that. It is grotesquely racist and frankly unforgivable.’

‘If only David was here. He was the only one who ever cared for me.’ Kate bit her tongue. She didn’t doubt that the photograph of David Bloody Underpants on the beach in his absurdly tight swimming trunks pulled high above the waist had by now been swapped back to pride of place on her mother’s side table.

Kate ended the call. The phone immediately started buzzing again. She pressed call reject repeatedly, and they engaged in this terrible game until, somehow, a call from the home itself managed to slip between her mother’s frantic redialling.

It was from the long-suffering care manager, Jessica. She said she felt she needed to inform Kate that her mother had punched Lisa that afternoon. Lisa had been so upset she had gone home sick. The home could not, Jessica said, tolerate this behaviour much longer and they would soon be asking her mother to move elsewhere unless matters improved rapidly.

There was nothing Kate could say in her mother’s defence. She promised to come round and speak to her. She wondered if she would one day be forced to care for her here at home, on the grounds that nowhere else would take her.

Kate rang off and immediately broke her promise. There was no way she could face her mother or her issues. She went to the sitting room and lay down on the sofa. Rose kept an immaculate house and the place was spotless.

She closed her eyes and put a cushion over her face. She had given up trying to sleep. The phone rang again and she saw that it was Dr Wiseman’s surgery. She picked up. ‘Dr Wiseman.’

‘I’m sorry it’s taken me some time to return your call.’

‘No problem at all. Thank you for taking the trouble to ring.’ Kate waited for him to open the dialogue, but she had recognized already that he used silence to draw his patients out. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said eventually. ‘When I left your clinic, I felt a degree of relief, elation even, as if someone finally understood me, as if I might even understand myself. I took it that, yes, I had issues, but I could see the possibility of resolution and that brought great hope.

‘But whereas I saw a potential solution in the light of day, in the dead of night all I could think of was that I had a problem. And my mind just wouldn’t – couldn’t – switch off. I took sleeping pills one night, then worried I’d get addicted to them, so last night I was determined to doze off without them—’

‘Why were you determined to do that?’

‘Because I know they’re addictive.’

‘Who told you that?’