She pouts. ‘Well, we do medical enhancements too and my Botox training only took a weekend, and it’s a well-known fact beauty therapists do injectables way better than doctors.’

One reversible, trivial procedure compared to the entire canvas of the human body and all its frightening possibilities; a bucket of chardonnay has made Marilyn even more full of herself than usual.

But she’s closer to the truth than she knows. Because right now, anything seems preferable to a lifetime of doctoring. If that’s even an option for me anymore, after the nightmare of last week’s exams.

‘With respect, Marilyn,’ my mother says, in the sarcastic tone she usually reserves for me, ‘I wouldn’t trust you with anything sharper than a pair of tweezers, hen. Whereas my son is going to change the world.’

Oh, Mum, if only you knew.

Every year, I tell myself it’ll get better. My first two years were bearable, lifted by occasional moments of pure wonder. The third was tough, but after India, I thought I could stop taking the pills, be the doctor my mum wants me to be, the fiancé Kerry deserves.

I was wrong. It’s like running on a treadmill operated by a sadist. I’m keeping up with the academic side, but whenever I take a patient history, I cringe as if I am standing naked on stage, holding a banner reading ‘village idiot’. Venepuncture is the ultimate humiliation, reducing my poor victims to tears in my doomed missions to find a decent vein.

My contemporaries laugh about their own incompetence, but they are all more capable than I am. Laura has a mosquito’s ability to find blood, while Wilcox charms everyone, even the matrons, into doing his dirty work. Plus, he always seems to find the question that unravels a patient’s condition, however mysterious or obscure.

‘Move over, George Clooney. There’s a new doctor in town,’ he says after every correct diagnosis, and the nurses keep laughing, falling for his lines and tumbling into his bed.

But I can’t be too hard on Wilcox, because if he’d never introduced me to the uppers and the sleeping pills, I would have crashed out in year one.

‘. . . but I’d love him to be a cardiac surgeon. Or a wonderful, warm GP, the kind of man who takes care of generations of families, and always has time for someone in need.’ My mother is talking, and even though I zoned out of the beginning, I see pride in her eyes as she shares her ambitions for me.

My only ambition is not to kill anyone.

Mum is tipsy as we support her crossing the road back to the bungalow, her soft Scottish accent suddenly more muscular. She goes straight to bed.