I reach onto the floor and pop out an immunotab, crunch it in my dry mouth. I should get up and spray myself with alcowash, take a tooth lozenge then boil up some of the sterilised grey water for tea.

I know though, once I rise Nita will wake, the rhythm will take over.

‘What will you do today?’ I’ll ask. And she will say ‘I’ll ride the train to the riverbank. Like every day. And there I will make flowers. And then I will go to sell my flowers, at the foot of the busy bridge.’ And she will then say, as she always says, ‘Will you be with us later?’

I close my eyes. A few more moments here. My body already moving towards the day’s work. The whine of the polisher. The dust, like flour. Making paste round the seal of my eyeguard.

The way the heat throws itself back off the walls.

I think of all the water locked up in the cement of the Dock. One hundred and fifty litres bound up in each cubic metre of concrete. They do not talk about that.

And how much of that becomes powder in the air.

Nita moves. Stretches, and the tattoo of a bird seems to dip along the tan sky of her skin.

On the table close to the bed, the bare light catches her scissors and thread.

An old lump of smoky white glass, long-ago long-smoothed by the river. It looks like a chunk of impossible ice.

I try to imagine the berg again, there in the Dock. When finally we’ve finished.

I can’t help but be in awe.

Millions in this city. The Thames tanks just can’t hold enough, Water Train or not.

However many little watercourses they find and reopen. Like the one they’ve found that runs beneath the Dock site.

Think of it. The city was full of streams and rivers, centuries ago. But they covered them with tunnels and built houses over them.

And now we have this. An iceberg!

People are astonishing.

My father used to say, ‘We fear the worst and do our best.’

We have the imagination and the science to tow an iceberg into the centre of a city.

Hillie comes quietly through and climbs onto the bed, as she does every morning, like a little person-clock.

I pretend to be asleep. Sense she puts her finger on her mother’s bird tattoo.

Then, from the street there is a sudden cheer. A hiss. A pile of voices. A crisp shatter against the window glass.

The little one looks up, as startled as I am, and I make a shush with my finger and mouth. Then I lift her off the bed, Nita uncurling.