When the door closes behind her, I slump on the bed and do what I haven’t done since I found Mother collapsed on the kitchen floor surrounded by bottles of pills. ‘It’s all your fault. You don’t love me,’ she said that day, before Dad came home to find her lying there, comatose. ‘Why didn’t you call an ambulance? You stupid girl,’ he shouted at me, ‘or gone into the neighbour’s house?’

He’d have gone ballistic if I’d let the neighbours see her like that; the neighbours were not meant to know, no one was meant to know, because it wasn’t real. It was all in my imagination, even the ambulance and the sirens. None of it was real. Neither were the tears that dropped down my cheeks. Dad wiped them away and said, ‘Be a big girl now. Your mother needs you to be a big, strong girl. Big girls don’t cry.’

No they don’t. And I swore I would never let this happen again. I rub the pathetic tears away, licking the salt off the back of my hand.

I stride into the corridor, wishing I wasn’t wearing my granny socks. Now I want to feel the sharpness of it, now I want to give myself the edge. I have the cash Sandra gave me, which, when I count it, comes to eighty euros. My eyes water. No more. I never want to feel the vulnerability of those tears again, and in my hurry to get to the stuff, I forget to wait and I forget to knock, and just barge on in there. The woman is on all fours on the ground facing the door, facing me, with a blank expression on her face as a man stands behind her, grinding himself in and out of her, slamming against her. I’ve seen this on the screen many, many times, but never let it happen to me, even when I was off my head, not for want of Brian trying. The women in the flicks don’t seem real, but this woman’s dead eyes lock on to mine and when she registers me, flickers of pain and shame and recognition passes through them. There is a moment when I see her, really see her, and I realise this is worse than I ever imagined it could be.