Deidre turned her shrewd gaze to me. ‘Oh piss off,’ she said. ‘Do you think I don’t know who you are? What you do? Do you know?’ she said, addressing Ms Simon. ‘This woman makes bombs. She literally makes fucking weapons that blow little kids like these sky-high.’

I wondered how she knew that. Was she obsessed with me? Had she been googling my name deep into the night, reading the corporate profile that popped up on Raleigh’s website?

‘Deidre, I am going to have to ask you to be mindful of your language,’ said Ms Simon.

‘Seriously?’ Deidre spat. ‘That’s what you care about? Here we are because one child fell – deliberately, I might add – a few feet onto a safety mat. She’s out there dreaming up ways to blow thousands of kids to kingdom come and you honestly don’t give a shit?’

Connor chose this moment to speak. ‘It’s not like that,’ he said, his voice firm. ‘It’s like karate.’

Ms Simon drew the meeting to a close.

We drove home in companionable silence. Samuel slept in the back seat. That night the domestic things happened in quiet harmony; Connor and I were gracious with each other, feeding and bathing Samuel, setting the table, pouring wine, stacking the dishwasher. In bed I felt the cool tip of Connor’s enquiries at my hip; and though it didn’t quite happen, it almost did.

It was a week or so later that I had the idea that Samuel would make an ideal donor for Connor. He had no parasites, no history of sexually transmitted diseases; he hadn’t had time to develop a dependency on alcohol or drugs. Connor had read about DIY faecal transplants, but thought it was too risky. He wanted the doctor, the twilight anaesthetic, the certainty that the donation would be sprayed all the way up to the top of his bowels. I convinced him to try it my way.

I watched an instructional video and let Samuel watch it with me. In it, a man demonstrated how to make the solution, by putting a chocolate-coated banana into a blender with water and salt. I thought Samuel would be horrified at the sight of the banana, but he just watched, fixated, as the mixture whizzed to the consistency of a milkshake.

The next day, I explained to Samuel that he had to pass his stool into a sterile plastic container because his donation was very precious. This explanation was good enough for him; he nodded, sombre as a bishop. I let him stay in the kitchen while I made the solution and drew it into an enema bulb. Afterwards the blender went straight into the rubbish bin outside.