I remember someone telling me that once. Assume things are fine. The secret, then, of how to be normal: if you don’t know, if everything sways one way then the other, then you can make the choice.

You can choose to be sane.

On the way home, I stop off at the supermarket and load up a trolley with all the things I should have bought these last two weeks. I carry the bags all the way up the hill, their handles carving deep runnels into my arms. Back at the flat, I take a shower to wash the remains of the chlorine out. I clean the whole flat, I do three loads of laundry, I tick off every single task on my to-do list. From the living room, I throw away all my scrawled pages of notes.

Then that afternoon, almost like a reward, Abayomi calls on my work mobile. The ringing is like an alarm going off in the flat; the phone trembles where I left it on the kitchen table.

When I answer, the conversation doesn’t take long. There’s only one thing he’s calling to tell me.

They are ready for me to come back to work.

Chapter 20

BACK THEN

Prin and Jane are playing in the bedroom with the curtains closed. It’s August, and the hottest day of the year so far. It is midday and far, far too hot to play outside. Daddy has said that later, once the sun has gone down a bit, he will set the sprinkler up on the lawn. Prin is looking forward to that. She’s excited to show off her cartwheels to Jane. She can almost do them with her legs straight now. She has been practising.

For now, though, Prin and Jane are inside, playing with Prin’s dolls. Prin has a whole story in her head for them to act out, but Jane isn’t keeping up. She seems more interested in making the dolls sit upright, with their legs together and their skirts straight. ‘It doesn’t matter how they sit,’ Prin keeps telling her, but for some reason, it matters to Jane.

Despite the closed curtains, Prin is still hot. Both of them are wearing shorts and T-shirts, but even that feels to Prin like too much. The curtains aren’t really thick enough and the sun is slanting through, making the carpet warm under the window seat, close to where they are sitting. The air in the room is thick and muggy. No breeze. No air at all almost, it feels.

Prin picks up one of the dolls. She has a whole scene in her head, ready to act out. ‘Don’t!’ cries Jane, which is stupid, because it’s Prin’s doll, she can do whatever she likes with it. But Jane has just spent the last five minutes arranging this doll just so, and now she’s upset that Prin has barged in on all that.