I’ve been to the dentist. Only an unavoidable appointment gets me out of the flat these days. Sometimes, it’s taking Dad two doors down to the eye clinic on Adelaide Road for one of his check-ups, when they nod at him and say, ‘Yes, Mr Alberta, you’re still blind’, and we go home again. Sometimes it’s for me – smear test, eye test (just to make sure I’m not going blind, too – joke!) – general things, to keep me tip-top. I’m Dad’s only carer. Well, I’m not really a carer at all; I’m more of a silent companion – but I don’t want to go under. Sometimes I go and see someone to ask if new technologies mean my birthmark can be lasered off me, at last, but the answer is always ‘no’. Not in my case. After they’ve told me, ‘Sorry, you’re staying ugly for ever’, sometimes I pop into the dress agency next door to the clinic and flick through – and sometimes buy – other people’s beautiful cast-offs, but I never wear them.

I don’t like my dentist. When he stuck that needle into my gum to numb me for my filling, he tutted at me for wriggling in the chair and I had an overwhelming urge to bite his thumb. Before that, I’d attempted to make small talk with him, but he wasn’t interested. Gruff bastard. As he did the filling, I lay back in the Smurf-coloured dentist chair and concentrated on a row of thank-you cards on the windowsill and the fly flitting lazily between them. The dental nurse sipped from a ‘Get ready for a great smile’ mug and leant forward to make one of the cards into a ramp for a crossing plump ladybird, then plopped her unceremoniously out of the open window.

After my own escape, I walked to the tube with my lips like sausages, extended three feet from my face. The tube was stifling and I successfully avoided the eye of every single person wedged like sweating anchovies – brackish and intermittently hairy – in the carriage. An old lady dropped a book on the floor, from her seat, and I bent forward, from mine, to give it back to her. She smiled at me and I smiled back, then I quickly looked down again. I don’t like to be on any sort of radar, even if her smile was friendly and her eyes gentle.

When I got off at Warren Street to change for the Northern Line, there was suddenly a fleet of us, hot and sticky, going nowhere on the lower concourse.

‘What on earth’s going on?’

‘Bloody hell!’

‘It’s too hot for this!’