On the burning pavement again, I remembered that I could have paid with my phone. If he hadn’t barged in like that, I would have. So now as well as being thirsty and hot, I was irritated. Had he done it deliberately to unsettle me? There were men who did that. They bodied their way into your spaces, crowded you and made you anxious so they could gain control of things.

I brushed away the thought and refocused on leaving the day behind me, shucking as I walked. Russell would be at home already. I pictured him smiling at me and handing me a beer. Two fingers would be raised. ‘Take two sips. Then we can talk.’ And then two sips later the heat would have dissipated enough. And I wouldn’t care as much any more about whatever it was that I was burning with.

On the curve where the bridge began, I met the tang of Thames salt and stew coming off the water. A breeze blew across the surface; there was nothing cool in it. The exhausted crowd gathering at the lights stood, steaming in the weather, just waiting to cross the bridge. The seconds dragged until there was a shift in the mass and people began slowly to wade across the road.

The standing traffic rumbled low. A bus wheel screamed. I started to jostle forward, when I felt a presence by my side. It was more than just another person in a crowd. At the feather-ends of my nervous system, I knew something wasn’t right.

I tensed at the solid presence of a man, too close, beside me, breath and bone, out of my eyeline but looming. I shifted minutely away from him, just enough to take the weight of his arm off mine. My heart beat in my throat. He was just a fraction behind me now. The seconds pulsed on. I waited in the huddle, hoping to merge with it into the flow until we were lost to one another. Finally, the crowd ebbed slowly forward, and I waited impatiently for some space to move into. When the front-runners crossed to the halfway point, making room for the rest of us, I stepped onto the road but as soon as I did, I was wrenched rudely back, as if my bag or sleeve had caught on something. My pulse rabbited. A hand was on my arm, gripping hard, pulling me just as a silver BMW careened off the tarmac and ploughed into a lake of people on the pavement.

In the pocket of silence between the firework’s light and its bang, airbags thumped inside the windscreen one after the other. A second later, the sky was filled with smoke, with screams and the hum of pandemonium. Time stopped and then fast-forwarded.