I packed essentials into two suitcases and the rest into a trunk my father had had when he went off to university. My mother said she would send it on to 19 Russia Road, London W9. The whole journey would take less than two hours, with luck. She phoned for a taxi to take me to the station. In case I wouldn’t do it, I suppose, if it was left to me. She hovered and I could tell she was wondering whether to kiss me. Neither of them had kissed me or so much as touched me for two years. It was as if I had a contagious disease. My father appeared from the garage where he has a little sanctuary for himself with a TV set and an armchair and said he expected I wanted to be off.

My mother looked at her watch. “The taxi hasn’t come yet.”

“I did try to save him,” I said. “I held on till I couldn’t hold on anymore. I wasn’t strong enough, that’s all.”

“We don’t talk about that, Clodagh,” my mother said. “We’ve put that behind us.”

My father said, “We have to get on with our lives.”

The taxi came. The man rang the bell and walked back down the path. Mum kissed the air an inch from my face. Dad laughed in an indulgent kind of way, a how-sweet-look-what-a-happy-family-we-are way, and he snatched up my cases and carried them to the taxi. Before I got into the back I took a last look at the pylon, planted there in the middle of the field, a skeleton with steel bones. My father, watching me, shook his head and went back into the house. We got to Ipswich with ten minutes to spare before the train came in.

Warwick Avenue is the name of the tube stop. I’d been in the underground before but not often, not since I was a child, not since the car wash. The worst thing that ever happened to me was the pylon but the next worst was the car wash. I’ll write about that another time, not now. Now was the tube. I hated being down there. I clenched my fists and set my teeth, but there were plenty of people and that made it a bit better. A taxi would have taken me from Liverpool Street Station but I couldn’t really afford it and besides it was too late now. I was down there, in the tunnels, the roofs pressing down on me, the walls crowding in. I concentrated on my London A–Z all the way from Oxford Circus to Paddington and when I knew I’d know the way without looking at it again, there was just one more mile to go before I could climb up into the light and air.