When we got to the hospital a nurse said she was sorry, but Lou had been taken off to surgery to have her leg pinned. I wondered aloud why she was sorry, because surely that was better than not getting it pinned if that’s what it needed. I hadn’t even really wanted to say that, but my mouth has a mind of its own and sometimes what comes out is not always strictly my idea.

The nurse didn’t even draw breath, though, so I guess she’d heard it all before. She told me I wasn’t to worry and that Lou had one badly broken leg (left, tibia, hence the pin), nasty lacerations to the right lower leg, and some minor cuts and bruising to her face. But she’s OK, she said. I looked at the faces of the very normal nurse and normal old Mr Kevacovic and thought, These people actually think my mother is OK. How wild is that. That’s a statement not a question.

Kev had to go back to school, but he’d walked me to the ward Lou was going to be taken to after her surgery and gave me his mobile number. He told me to phone him if I needed anything, but I said I had it covered and I’d call my father to pick me up. It’d be a long wait for that bullet train from Kyoto, but Mr Kevacovic couldn’t be expected to remember the parental details of every student he was responsible for and I was counting on it.

While I was waiting in a room near the nurses’ station, I overheard one of them mention a van driver in bay fourteen who’d had a bang on the head and was staying in overnight for observation. A different voice replied that the woman he’d hit on her moped was coming down from surgery in about half an hour. ‘We’d better keep them apart,’ she said. ‘Haha.’

So I thought, I’ve got half an hour to kill.

The guy was sitting up in bed reading a magazine. He had a huge plaster on his forehead and was squinting very hard, like he needed glasses, which gave me some hope. When I said who I was, he looked like he was going to cry, and he grabbed my hand and started pumping it up and down like I’d won a scholarship. He said he was sorry about a hundred times, and some other stuff, like he’d never even had so much as a broken headlight in eighteen years of driving for Tesco, and he was definitely going under the speed limit, because he always did. And that he couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen him, because right before they collided he could have sworn she looked right at him. Almost right through him. Never seen anything like it, he said. And then he did cry, and I felt bad and thought, Yeah well, you never met my mother before.

The thing is, I’ve always had my suspicions about what Lou might be capable of. Only suspicions. Like, had she or had she not been looking when she managed to slice the top off her middle finger making sushi? Did she or did she not inadvertently leave the gas cooktop on one night when I was having a sleepover at my dad’s hotel? Was it really an accident when she set fire to her fringe at our flats’ summer garden party? I’m joking about that last one, because Lou swore black and blue she was leaning over to see if the sausages were ready and, well, that was some sausage surprise. Her words not mine. I hope I’m joking, but no way am I letting my guard down just to get fooled by a sausage.