I step out into the sunshine and hop straight on a bus that’s heading to Oxford Circus. I head up to the top deck, sit about six rows back and look out of the window. London is sunny and sticky and in full-swing this morning. People are sauntering, jackets off, smiling at each other: things that don’t happen in the winter. The bus stops at traffic lights. Another pulls up alongside us, very close. I look down into the gap between the two buses and see a woman in an A-line denim skirt, sandals and an orange T-shirt squeeze through it, almost completely swivelled sideways, her tasselled beige bag tucked on her shoulder behind her. I watch her get on the other bus, through my viewfinder of thick, dusty dual glass. She looks like my mum, circa 1975 – pre-flight. Same shoulder-length hair, fashionable then, unfashionable now; that Farrah Fawcett flick. I watch her as she taps her Oyster card then she disappears and I see her reappear moments later on the top deck; she takes a seat halfway down, inches away from mine.

I thought I saw my actual mum once, getting on a bus, not long after her final visitation. There was some tatty cycling shorts and a perm; a confidence that looked chemical. I was crossing Oxford Street to the giant Topshop on the corner, alone – when once I would have gone with Georgina, for trying-on sessions and some light coerced shoplifting – but instead I stepped on to the bus behind the woman I thought was my mother and followed her up the stairs to the top deck. It wasn’t her. She was sitting three rows from the back and when I got there, I realized she had the wrong nose, the wrong chin, the wrong face. She wasn’t my mum. I turned round and I got off the bus at the next stop, so angry with myself for thinking it was her, for that tiny part of my heart that let me down by hoping it was.

‘Sorry, love.’

A big man with a small dog in his arms squeezes on to the seat next to me. I budge up. The woman on the other bus, even closer to me now, through the glass, is also nothing like my mother. Nothing at all. The man next to me shifts in his seat. He smells like bananas. The dog stares at me, doleful and suspicious.

Kemp says he misses me, but the fact that I don’t miss my mum was another thing I told him, another black spot on my soul that I helpfully pointed out for his perusal. Another reason I could never expect him to be more than my friend. That’s not normal, right? To not miss your mother? It hardly makes me someone to get romantically involved with. It makes me strange, off-kilter, someone to be suspicious of. Unlovely.