It’s like she’s having an out-of-body experience and can see herself from the Bang and Olufsen speaker in the top corner like a wide-eyed spectator on Gogglebox. She’s really bloody doing it. She’s actually snapped.

‘You shit. I hate you,’ Maddy screams. The release of these words feels majestic. Her rage feels all-consuming – like she’s plugged into an electricity socket.

‘Jesus! Stop it! Calm down.’ Trent inches forward, tentatively patting the air.

Maddy stares at him, seeing him for what he is – a red-faced adulterous stranger. She storms towards him and picks up his phone from the counter. She presses it so violently against his chest he falls backwards.

She swoops down and re-joins her corporal self as she plucks the car keys from the reclaimed console table in the hall and swings her tote onto her shoulder. Slamming the wood and glass front door as hard as she possibly can, she notes that the wreath that she made by hand, which got over a thousand likes on her feed, has sprung off the door in solidarity and tumbled to the floor. She stalks out to the Porsche Cayenne on the gravel drive, opens the door and gets in, only realising then that she’s still in her Ugg slippers. It’s no matter. Her gym kit is in the boot.

Trent is on the front doorstep shouting, but she doesn’t wind down the window as he kicks the wreath. A string of lights – one of the twenty that Maddy put up single-handedly – falls and he battles with it like Indiana Jones being attacked by a snake. She beeps the electric gates and drives out of the driveway.

The white-hot anger still radiates from her.

She turns out of the lane and heads south. She’s going to find her son.

3

Everybody’s Having Fun

Tor mainly works out of the cramped Home Help office in town, coordinating the food bank donations and the charity admin, but thanks to Brexit and Covid, she’s lost most of her volunteers and runs the outreach catering van herself with Greg and Arek.

Now she gives out the last mustard-coloured polystyrene carton from the thermal bag in the back of the van and stamps her feet. The temperature has plummeted, and she blows into her cupped hands, wishing she had thicker gloves than the cheap fingerless ones she has on. Having come straight to her shift from her swim earlier, she hasn’t had the chance to properly warm up.

She jumps down from the van and starts to clear up. She knows she needs to get in the warm soon, remembering now, too late, that she’s forgotten to take her dose of methotrexate. She reminds herself to accept her condition with good grace. After all, it could be a lot worse. When she started losing weight a few months ago, with no reasonable explanation, she thought she might have cancer, or something properly nasty. Then her joints had started aching, her toes and ankles feeling as if they’d been stuck with glue. She progressed onto thinking that she must have Covid-19, but then, after a blood test, she was told that she had Rheumatoid Arthritis. She was stunned. She thought only old ladies got it, but apparently not.