I know the answer. I’ll probably keep it hidden. I wish it was hidden. I hate that Kemp has seen my work. I hate that he has photos of it on his phone. I don’t want to put myself out there. I never have done. I may be traipsing all over London now but my confidence is far from sauntering about, troubling anyone. My heart (and my art) is better off under lock and key.

I feel unsettled, out of kilter: Salvi hasn’t contacted me in three days, leaving me in perilous limbo; hanging off a rickety rope bridge over a churning river of my own insecurities. A letter is winging its way to my mother, breaking the seal of silence she has spun between her and her daughters for so long; I fear it will shatter, like glass. And Kemp was going to invite me to India to be his friend with benefits. I see no benefit in that at all, as I loved him. I don’t want to be his friend with anything and I can’t even be his friend at all, any more. I wish Dad and I had never gone to beautiful St Dunstan in the East; I wish I had never seen Kemp there – returned, handsome, not ever able to love me.

Lawrence P. Sullivan is talking about a community project in Canada. I look at Dad and he is enraptured. He is nodding at things I don’t understand. Words of wisdom about sound textures and sonics and acoustics. Basset Man next to us is still providing his own sound textures by tinkering with his scratchy-foiled wares. Astoundingly, he proffers them to Dad again.

‘My Dad’s blind,’ I whisper across, in the hope of erasing the tireless sandwich-offering and the irritated look on the man’s face at Dad’s non-acknowledgement.

‘Oh, you’re blind!’ shouts the man, causing a lot of people to turn round and a few to shush. ‘I thought you were just rude!’

‘I try not to be both at the same time,’ says Dad.