‘Nick’s been arrested,’ I said urgently. He stopped dead and stared at me. Then he pushed me again, harder. ‘You have to help him.’

‘Just get out!’

‘Please help him.’ He pulled the door open and shoved me to the threshold. ‘Just put me in touch with people who can help. I’ll give NatSec your name if you don’t!’ I did my best to sound as if I would go through with it.

He threw me out and I stumbled over the step as he slammed the door. I tried knocking although I knew he wouldn’t answer. The house might as well have been empty and boarded up. Not wanting to draw the attention of the neighbours, I walked away, but only to the end of the street, where I waited, thinking. For once the smog was a blessing, as it hid me.

Ten minutes later, with the cold seeping through my limbs, I saw him emerge. I planned to follow him but he opened up his garage, jumped in a car and drove off, so that I saw only his rear lights glowing as they sped away.

On the way home, I stopped to sit on a wooden bench to think. Above it, a hoarding depicted the Needle road as the tip of an actual syringe, literally sucking the blood out of the RGB.

Schoolchildren filed past me towards a large secondary school, and I deliberated whether, if I never saw Nick again, looking after Hazel would be a role that I could take on indefinitely. That would be if they let me, of course – the state often took away the children of dissidents, raising them in communal schools to drain them of their parents’ divergent views.

It was a daunting prospect. After all, I had no experience of actually bringing up a child, and fourteen was probably the hardest age of all to take on – she would be old enough to rebel against my edicts but not yet able to take responsibility for her own. How would I deal with that? With great difficulty, I imagined.

The sound of the radio buzzed down from Hazel’s room when I got home around eleven o’clock. Churchill was speaking. ‘I walked through Regent’s Park this morning to breathe the fresh air of freedom. It is a simple thing to walk along the road without fear, without let or hindrance,’ he rumbled. ‘To know that the man or woman that you pass is a friend and not the bully-boy agent of a state that treats its own citizens as the enemy. And so, to my friends on the other side of that ugly scar on the face of our nation, I say only this: courage. Courage, for …’ And then the Internationale broke in with a loud and tinny whining, as our jamming stations locked on to the frequency.