I had deluded myself. I’d had to miss the first tube because the carriage was packed and I was pushed to the back of the cluster of bodies by an aggressive man in a pinstripe suit. My mother wouldn’t understand this and so there is no point in telling her: she has never lived or wanted to live in a big city. I got on the next train and spent most of the trip lodged between the door and the broad back of a tall teenager, my head locked at an angle so as to avoid touching him, my face still only an inch from the soft fold of his puppy-fat nape. His prickly ponytail swished across my cheek every time the train hiccupped to a halt. I stared at the underside of his jaw. It really bothers me when people don’t squeeze spots that are ready for squeezing. Please squeeze those spots. In the tunnel at Camden Town we stopped for a long minute, the carriage lights flickering. People shuffled, then quietened. I could taste their impatience in the hot dark; the boy’s Doritos sweat.

My mother and I dislodge the two sections of meat from the chicken’s breast.

At Euston I got off the train to change to the Victoria line. I followed the light-blue line along the tunnel. Have you noticed that the Victoria line and the NHS are codified with the same shade of sanitary blue? But ask a professional in either field and they’ll tell you that the premises aren’t as clinically spotless as they’d have you believe. It’s a cover-up. At our care home we don’t do hospital colours or hospital furniture. All the furniture is real furniture, like in a real home.

When the doors swooshed open I clutched the overhead bar with my hands and hurled my body inside. This carriage was also packed, thicker in the middle like an unpricked sausage. I rested my head on the pane next to the doors and stared into the empty space above the heads of the seated passengers. At the other end of the carriage an old lady with a shopping trolley had carved herself a rectangle of space inside the crowd. She was obviously a bus creature, who’d taken a chance and decided to enter this hostile world in which the elderly are considered a nuisance, an unacceptable presence. Why today?