Her eyes flicker open for a moment, before she closes them again and tries to slip back into the sleep, the tranquillizer that I emptied into her bedtime drink heavy in her blood. Warm milk with sugar – the same drink Mum always gave me before I went to sleep. My adoptive mother, that is. Not the jackal who gave birth to me.

‘Frankie. Wake up . . .’

She stirs, opens her eyes, looks confused, probably wondering why we’re outside, why the sky is so close.

I lift her onto the bench, stroke her hair. She’s so pretty. She looks so much like Alice when she was three, frozen in time, as if she was waiting for me to return. It’s as if my Alice is here. Three years old. Exactly as I left her. She never turned into the scowling, slutty teenager I’ve seen coming and going from Sean’s house.

‘What are we doing?’ little Frankie asks, looking around. ‘I want Mummy.’

‘I’m your new mummy.’ I try to hug her but she beats at me with her little fists, catches me in the tit, making me gasp. I raise a hand to slap her but restrain myself.

‘We’re waiting,’ I say.

‘What for?’

I could tell her we’re waiting to say goodbye. But I really don’t want to see her cry again. So I sit beside her and think about the past, letting my life flash before my eyes in a way I can control. Starting with The Mistake.

The Mistake changed my life. Reeling from the truth about who I really was, about everything, I fled. I erased myself – the only thing I could do, scorching the earth upon which I stood.

I travelled to the other side of the world, to a nondescript suburb of Brisbane, Australia, where I set about living the most nondescript life possible. I changed my name to Marion, I met a nice man called Howard, who was thirty years older than me, with enough money to compensate for his tubby gut and stubby dick. I told him I was an orphan, that I had no family, that I was all alone in the world. He liked that. He wanted to be my world. Like most men, he had Handsome Prince syndrome.

We got married. Nobody asked about my past, so I didn’t tell them. We moved into his house. It had a pool in its big garden, a succession of state-of-the-art barbecues and, not having to work, I passed a decade swimming and sunbathing, stoned out of my mind on anti-depressants and cannabis, staring at the flat blue surface of the pool, day after day, nothing to do except suck Howard’s stubby dick at night, until it stopped working properly, and prepare meaty dishes for him and open his beer.

I forced Alice and Sean from my mind. Did everything I could to forget they existed.