But she just starts screaming again. On the FeverScan her temperature reads 104. I sit, holding her on the bed, trying to keep calm. Children always have high temperatures, they can shoot up and down within the space of minutes. It means nothing. It’s just a fever, flu . . . Dear God, why is she still screaming? Her arms flail out and she clutches her head like a mad thing.

‘Emmy, does your neck hurt?’ I say urgently. ‘Emmy.’ I snap on the light, watching to see if she flinches, then pull up her nightdress to look for a rash. The one that either does or doesn’t go when you press a glass to it. Oh, God, meningitis, whose symptoms are as well known to a parent as the Lord’s prayer. This happened once before, when Jack was small. The doctor who came round had eyes rimmed black with tiredness. ‘If a child’s temperature reacts in any way to Calpol, it’s not meningitis,’ he’d said. ‘It’s the only way to tell.’

I sit through the next hour, biting my lip, holding Emmy close, trying to think of ways to endure the screaming calmly, praying for her to cool down, praying for her to suddenly pass out in the muck sweat of a fever peaked, but as the minutes tick by she becomes increasingly fitful. I put my hand on her head for the hundredth time. She’s hot. Really hot. Each consecutive black square on the FeverScan lights up green and I try to quell my rising panic. If Calpol doesn’t bring the temperature down within the hour, you’re supposed to call the doctor. I look at Emmy and snap out of my daze. Right, I think. Call the doctor. Call the doctor.

But I have no doctor.

‘What is it?’ Jack is standing sleepily in the doorway. ‘What’s wrong with her? Why doesn’t she stop screaming?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say shakily. ‘Look, stay with her, okay, make sure she doesn’t fall off the bed.’ I run downstairs and find the number for the medical centre in Ague, but it’s answered by only the most cursory of messages. The clinic is shut until nine a.m. No night service. It’s two a.m. I dial my GP’s number in London and page the night doctor, but the system won’t allow me to punch in an overseas calling code.