I mooched around. I looked in the window of H&M. I flicked through magazines in Smith’s until the security guard glared at me.

Mum had died. Dad had left. Sasha and I were almost orphans.

I wandered down a little corridor around the back of Boots. It looked like a place for staff only, but there wasn’t a sign and I had a vague memory of going down here once before, when I was very little. I had a flashback to my younger self waiting in a room somewhere around here with Dad. I remembered him sitting with his head in his hands while I stared at one of those brightly coloured magazines people buy for their children to keep them quiet.

The corridor ended in exactly the tiny room that was in my head. There was a small, grimy window high up in the wall, letting in the only natural light I’d ever seen in Beachview. One side of the room had a bench along it, the sort you found in swimming-pool changing cubicles, and the other had a row of pegs with nothing hanging on them. The walls were dirty cream, with peeling paint on wooden panels.

I closed the door and sat on the bench.

Dad had always been horrible to Sasha. He sometimes ignored her, sometimes shouted, and one memorable time he’d pushed her against a wall and yelled right into her face until Mum pulled him away. Nothing Sasha did was ever good enough. Even when she was acing exams and applying to study medicine, the very thing he’d wanted both of us to do, he had found a way to be disappointed. If she got ninety per cent in a test he wanted to know what had gone wrong with the other ten, whereas if I got seventy per cent he’d give me five pounds. He wanted us to be doctors to make him look good. A family of doctors. That was his dream.

I’d never dared to tell him I didn’t want to be a doctor and now I wouldn’t have to.

I leaned back against the wall, trying to breathe deeply, the way Mum used to make me do when she was ill. She’d been dead for nearly a year and I had missed her for every single moment of it. Once, I’d lived my life on the basis that she was always going to be around. She’d taught me to talk, to cross the road, to use a knife and fork. She had taught me everything I’d needed to know, and now I was sixteen, and I knew those things, and I would just have to get on with them.