She loaded her bags in the boot, one by one, their weight dislocating her arms and her legs jangling underneath her until she thought she would collapse in a pile of shards on the ground. Then she climbed into the driving seat, turned the key with spindly, clattering fingers, and headed home, driving very carefully. The wheel trembled under her hands; lights changed to red, to green, bouncing inside her eyelids. She tried to remember which pedal belonged to the accelerator, the brake, the clutch. The great yellow ball of the sun clanged in her head. She parked outside her house, took out the shopping bags and shuffled them up the path, opened the door and stepped inside, where it was cool and dark as a church.

She took off her sandals and the grainy boards comforted her stinging feet. In the kitchen, she saw that dust motes spun in the shafts of light striking through the slightly opened slatted blinds. It looked beautiful, she thought, like a painting she used to know in a different time. She put the food away, though it took so long and the clock ticked louder and louder in her head, setting off jabbing echoes. Went upstairs, dragging her feet step by step.

Closed the curtains in the girls’ bedrooms, shrouding them in drugged grey light, pulled the sheets, pillowcases and duvet covers off each of the beds, and put them downstairs beside the washing machine, a soft white heap of cotton. There was a light flashing on her answering machine and she looked at it for a minute but didn’t bother to listen to it.

Like a sleepwalker, she went out into the garden, where she bent to pick up the bucket and spade, the plastic mug and the headless Barbie from the sandpit. Clem’s wooden sword was planted firmly into a flower bed, and she drew it out and wiped the mud off on the grass as if it were blood. There was a bird singing loudly from somewhere, but she couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from and when she tried to look the flat shiny blue of the sky blinded her and the clouds wheeled round so that she felt she was falling upwards.

She padded back into the kitchen, over the tiles. She picked up a tumbler off the draining board, dropped three cubes of ice into it, then unscrewed the top off the whisky bottle. She poured a generous amount over the ice. It was a glorious colour, she thought – amber like the earrings Adrian had once given her in that different world she remembered like a dream, and it glinted when she swirled it round and it burned her throat when she swallowed it. She could feel it like a narrow lane of fire flaming through her.