She considered, not for the first time, becoming one of those mothers who carries fruit with them everywhere, pulling it out of the insides of their handbags like a magic trick, eternally resourceful. On the front door, beside the cockroaches, although she tried not to look, tried not to be confronted with her own ignorance of the French language too often, was a notice with a photo of a rat, no X running through it, free to do what he pleased. It was a vicious rat, his tiny teeth bared. He looked motivated.

When the boy went to the bathroom, she flicked through his phone, the one concession they allowed him. There was never anything of concern, just a sadness attached to it, a lonely phone gasping for contact. She watched the clips he had recorded from the police station across the road from the school, his newest fascination. Blue-uniformed boys wandered blurrily back and forth, groups of two or three, trying to look busy or brave, or both. They were armed in a traumatised city, their hands resting on their guns as if the gesture alone could reassure what happened before would never happen again. There were only five clips, shaky and accompanied by the raucous playground laughter of boys, but she watched them to the end.

*

The first time his wife called the police the woman went to the station with her own mother. They drove in silence. In the reception, they sat side by side and her mother advised her to just be herself, as if that – the whole process of being herself – wasn’t exactly why she was here in the first place. They waited in the exact same way, patiently, showing no hint of irritation, both betraying their own telltale signs of anxiety – her mother rummaged constantly in her handbag, the woman ran her fingers over greasy patches of her skin. A policewoman smiled gently at them, before beckoning the woman into a room. The woman remembered how she and her mother used to go to the bogs, weekend rebellions, the two of them running wild, comfortable in the dirt. Once, she slipped into a trench and had only managed to wade through the deep muck with her mother’s careful encouragement. The walk from one side of the station to the other was like that.

In the small, airless room she was told they had received a phone call from his wife. Her car had allegedly been stolen and the woman was the prime suspect, the only suspect. The doubt was in the allegedly. She knew that a policewoman was being used for her sensitivity, and she wondered how many sensitive cases she had to handle a week, and how much sensitivity she had left.