I have only been here for a few hours and already the cell is crushing me. If I sit down too long, the walls begin to reverberate, and there is a humming from the lights, or from something else, that I can’t shake. It buzzes deep into my skin and under my flesh so that I have to stand every few seconds to shrug it off. Thankfully there is other noise. I can hear men and women talking, their jocularity slamming hard against this doom that I am in. Murder.

When they processed me, they gave me a form asking me whether I felt suicidal. ‘Of course I do. I’m also highly claustrophobic,’ I wrote. Now, when I look back, I don’t know why I did that. I thought, idiotically, that they would take pity on me and think again about their bail decision. As if they might just say, we can’t keep him here, he’s claustrophobic. Let him, the murderer, go.

Somebody brings me a meal boated in plastic. I eat even though I’m not hungry because I always eat whenever there is food. I eat as much of it as I can and save whatever is dry in my pockets. The food is hot and smells plasticky, like Wotsits.

A vision comes to me of Rory and me tracking through an overgrown patch of scrub grass somewhere, a packet of Wotsits each in our hands. I remember it had been sunny after a morning full of showers. We were walking slowly through a park, picking a path through long grass. I began to wade on ahead, running slightly, cutting swathes through the damp grass. I was an explorer, preparing the way for the others in the expedition. But when I looked around, Rory was gone. My heart dipped for a second and I marched back again, retracing the flattened grass. At first, I thought he’d vanished and so I began to panic. But then I saw him right there on the grass, crouched down and sobbing. I went and knelt next to him. I remember the feel of the long, wet grass on my knees, the impressions they made afterwards. There were tracks down his cheeks.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Wotsits,’ he said through shudders of breath. And there they were, scattered along the grass, wet, soggy. There was orange stain on his hands. ‘They’re all ruined,’ he said. Rory, so bright for his age, so old for his years, was at that moment no more and no less than he was. Six.

I took his empty packet and tipped half of mine into his.

‘But they’re yours,’ he said between gulps.

‘I’m not that hungry,’ I said, pulling him up to his feet.