I have stopped walking and I know that to look at me now, motionless in the middle of the street, I’m one of those people you see shaking their fists at the world. Grizzled, angry, strange. But the memory is coming and I need it to crystallise. I have to keep hold of it, no matter what. So I sit where I am on the street without opening my eyes because I know if I open them, the pull of this memory will go. If there are people walking by, staring at me, I don’t care.

The ground is cold and hard. I try desperately to land the memory but it feels wispy and insubstantial. I lean hard against the low wall behind me to feel something solid. There’s something my mind has stored and now with synapses firing, it has found some significance to it. What is it?

But the image dissolves, and in its place is Ebadi’s home as it was on the police video. I scream for the memory devoured now, roughly, rudely, by the vulgar new one. The footage is eating my memory, contaminating it and invading the peace of my mind like an earworm.

I have to think of something else to destroy the memory worm: Seb, the house, the dollars, Grace, Rory. I slide one image after another into my head to shake my head back into order, but it’s no good. I can feel the invasive thoughts knocking. The resilience of them.

And now that word, resilience is setting its own hares racing. I wasn’t resilient enough. That was the problem. That’s what she thought. Grace.

When I saw her in her new flat, surrounded by boxes, she said she’d wanted me to do something nice for her. I chose dinner at a Café Rouge. It had been a student hang-out and now that we were fully grown, being there was dizzying, as if I was looking down at us from a height.

We ate solemnly. The meal had a biblical quality to it and by the end of it, I was more certain than ever that it was over. Finally, to break the gloom I reached into my pocket and presented her with the small box that was waiting there.

‘It’s your conch,’ I said as she took in the tiny gold pendant. ‘I found it in a drawer.’

She peered into the box and smiled sadly before taking it and closing the lid. We ate the rest of our meal in silence.

‘I think it’s time for me to go,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I’ll run you home.’

Grace pulled up outside what had been our house. I looked at her face and was shocked by how unfamiliar she had become, and how quickly.

‘I can come in for a coffee,’ she said, looking at her watch, ‘but only for fifteen minutes or so.’