My bones seem to twist as a shudder runs through me. I remember the appointment letter that came yesterday. I crouch down in front of him, jerking up his trouser leg. I’m looking for a cut, a mark, a bruise.

‘Ow!’ he exclaims. ‘Mummy, what are you doing?’

‘Did you hurt yourself?’ I ask him. ‘Did you hurt your leg?’

He twists away from me. ‘What? Nuh-uh.’

I stare up at him. He stares down at me. His backpack slips from his shoulder, and I reach out and catch it just before it falls.

The movement brings me back to my feet. I shake my head. I am being ridiculous. ‘Silly Mummy,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sorry.’ I set the backpack back on his shoulders and get a hold of myself.

The other parents and children are trickling away now. I reach for his hand. For a moment, he squints up at me, then allows me to take it.

It isn’t far to our flat, barely five minutes, and Charlie walks every one of them just fine.

At home, our little two-bed flat is reassuringly warm; the heating timer came on half an hour ago and already the radiators have heated it throughout. The hallway, the kitchen, the tiny living room are all so familiar and I am unspeakably glad to be home. This space I’ve created for me and Charlie, it’s so precious. It’s what I escaped to London for: our own little sanctuary in the world. For a moment though, as we step inside, I catch that smell again in my nostrils, the smell that was everywhere in flat sixteen – clogged, stale, everything collapsed. I hurry to unwrap Charlie from his clothes and put the oven on to cook him fish fingers, to fill up the kitchen with their smell.

I send Charlie to his room to get changed while I clatter a baking tray out of the cupboard and peas and fish fingers out of the freezer. The drawer is thick with ice; it needs defrosting and I have to yank at it to get it to slide out. It’s another thing I must remember to do, and I get my list out of the kitchen drawer and add it on. There are already five other things on there, including the tap in the bathroom that drips and needs fixing and the query with our council tax bill that I need to call up about, and I’ll get all of these things sorted, I will, but in the meantime, just having the list puts things in order. I fold the paper up again and set it back in the drawer.

I can hear Charlie singing to himself through in his bedroom, and the thump of his feet on our thin carpet as he hops about.