No more of our flat. No more of nice old Peter Carman, the downstairs neighbour, tending his roses and inviting Mum down for sherry and opera. No more of the nurses upstairs, coming home at odd times after night shifts or nights out.

No more London.

OK, so we weren’t in London proper but we were close enough for a bit of its dirty glamour to rub off. I didn’t know much about the countryside apart from that there was plenty of empty space, there was nothing to do and people were nosy. Our neighbours were easy to get away from: all we had to do was make a short journey by bus or train to lose ourselves in crowds of people all minding their own business, none of whom knew or cared who we were. In the countryside it would be different. People might be curious about us. We’d probably have to make the effort to be nice to them.

London let us be. The countryside would kill us slowly and watch us die.

It wasn’t right. It was all happening too fast and I had no say in any of it. If Mum was so desperate to reunite with my father and have another baby, couldn’t she at least have had the decency to wait till I’d left home?

I tried to like the idea of a little baby arriving in our lives, but it really didn’t come naturally. Shauna Perritt from the year above had got pregnant before GCSEs and had to leave the school; I’d seen her since a couple of times, walking round pushing a pram looking like she didn’t know what had hit her. I’d peered into the pram and said polite things like you were meant to do, but all I was thinking was, There is no way I am ever, ever letting that happen to me.

The longer I lay in bed thinking about all of this, the less likely it seemed that I would ever get off to sleep. And there was Ellie right next to me, the supposedly neurotic and anxious one, sleeping like a… sleeping like a baby. Like babies didn’t, usually. I remembered that much from when Ellie was little. Once Mum had given birth, we were in for a whole lot of screaming and crying.

Suddenly I couldn’t bear it any more.

I must have been lying there for an hour or more: it took less than five minutes to get dressed and escape.

My clothes for the next day were the only things of mine in the wardrobe. I’d left out the cardigan and sundress I’d worn on the flight; everything else was packed.

I got dressed, slid my feet into my sandals, grabbed my purse and my phone and the hotel room keycard and let myself out. The door clicked shut quietly behind me. I was back in the brightly lit, lushly carpeted adult world, where you could please yourself and things were arranged so as to make it easy for you.