Protect the boy. Get the inhaler.

‘Where’s your puff-puff, Wills?’ I said urgently.

He shook his head, another halting, gasping breath forcing its way down his constricted windpipe as it closed to a pinhole. I scooped him up and ran to the car, diving into the glove compartment for the spare inhaler I always kept there.

It wasn’t there. Shit.

Turning William’s schoolbag upside down, I emptied the contents onto the passenger seat. Books, colouring pens, a pencil case, conkers, sweet wrappers, a key ring, three toy cars and an unwrapped lolly stuck to a crumpled letter.

No inhaler.

Another jolt of panic.

Got to get him breathing again. Upstairs at hotel reception? No. Time wasted. Home is the nearest, surest place.

But what about Ben?

All the details of the moment came into sharp and brilliant focus. The dark leather soles of Ben’s shoes. A black Range Rover at the top of the ramp. Off in the distance, above ground, a siren. My son taking another half-strangled breath, thinner than the last. He swayed slightly on his feet, his movements slowing.

Make a choice. Make it now.

Ben still lay there, unmoving, on his back.

Protect the boy.

I should have stayed with Ben, gone upstairs to get the hotel staff, called an ambulance. Maybe driven him to hospital myself. I should have done something. But all I could hear was my son starting to suffocate. So I didn’t. I didn’t do any of those things.

Instead, I panicked.

I strapped William in and jumped into the driver’s seat.

5

I ran the first two red lights as I desperately tried to remember whether there was a pharmacy, a supermarket or a doctor’s surgery on my route home, William heaving and wheezing beside me in the passenger seat. Just be OK, son. Be OK. Home soon. We will make you better. Hold on. There was a pharmacy – but it was shut. We flew past and blew through another amber traffic light as it was turning red, weaving through traffic with the honks of other drivers behind us.

‘You’re going to be OK, Wills. We’ll be home in a minute and we’ll get you your puff-puff, OK?’

He nodded weakly but said nothing. His face was deathly pale now, eyelids drooping.

We hit a clear stretch of the North Circular and I pushed the car harder, undertaking a van and switching lanes to pass a white 4 x 4 on the right.

Ben.

I should call the hotel. Get him some help.

Except my mobile was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t in its usual place in my jacket pocket, nor in my jeans. The hands-free cradle on my dashboard was empty; the glove compartment too. I reached under the car seat as I drove. Nothing there. It would have to wait until I could use the landline at home.

It felt like the longest drive of my life.

Finally I pulled the car onto my drive with a screech of tyres, grabbed William and ran into the house, to the kitchen drawer where we kept a spare inhaler – please be there, please be there – and sat the boy down on a kitchen chair while he took a lungful of Ventolin. Then breathed deeply, and took another. I knelt in front of him, holding him steady, hearing his breathing slowly deepen, lengthen, as it returned to normal.