It was just the kind of place that he hated, cluttered and airless – a reminder of the cramped mustiness of his childhood. A heavy odour hung in the air – a mélange of old cooking smells and bodies, underlaid with damp. Abi heard a cough, a loud guttural hacking from beyond the wall.

‘That’s Guy,’ Valentina explained without any hint of embarrassment or apology. ‘He must be waking.’

Abi’s heart sank. The walls were paper-thin.

‘And the bathroom is just over here,’ Valentina said.

She was launching into an explanation of the vagaries of the plumbing when a door opened downstairs and they heard Eva’s voice, raised in surprise.

‘Oh. My. God,’ she said.

And then the shrieking delight of Corinne’s laughter coming up from below, at once distinctive and strange.

Mark reached the steps first, Abi following. Over his shoulder, she saw Corinne standing there alongside a boy in an oversized sports jersey. The pink dye in Corinne’s hair had started growing out. A strip of dark roots an inch wide ran the length of her parting. Her limbs were thin and deeply tanned beneath denim shorts and a lemon-yellow T-shirt, her hands cupped over her mouth so that her face showed only her eyes, lively with humour, exchanging glances with the boy. Abi looked beyond them for Beth, but the terrace was empty, shadows creeping over the cracked pavings.

‘You look like Justin Bieber,’ Eva said with disgust, and the boy answered in a voice that was soft and light and instantly recognizable:

‘No, I don’t.’

Abi’s eyes snapped back to him.

‘Beth?’ The name escaped her lips like a gasp.

Mark had already taken a step towards his daughter, reaching out a hand to touch the newly cropped hair. ‘Jesus,’ he said, sounding amused.

But Abi didn’t find it funny. Instead, she experienced a painful rush of love for her child mixed with anguish. All that Beth had suffered in the past – her raw vulnerability to every slight, every harsh remark – how could Abi possibly protect her when she invited this derision?

‘What have you done to yourself?’ she asked with dismay.

Beth’s hair had a hacked look to it, like the job had been done with nail scissors. It was shorn close to the scalp at the back and sides, the hair on top left a little longer – a small mercy – the ends bleached a horrible yellowish-white colour that made Abi think of rancid butter. The skin of Beth’s face looked pinkish and mottled against the lurid blond and there was a crusty-looking spot nestling in the crease to one side of her nose. The brutality of the haircut made her look vulnerable and exposed, like a mollusc ripped from its shell.

‘Do you like it? We did it ourselves.’ Beth’s smile was both nervous and gauche – a blithe embarrassment to it that made Abi melt a little.