Dad is in his chair when I get home, the window shut on the muffled sounds of buses rumbling past. He is cooking something for lunch – macaroni cheese with extra garlic, it smells like.

‘Hardly all the time, Dad.’ I go to the kitchen for a drink of water. Glug it down in one go. ‘I’ve been out twice in a week, that’s all.’

‘That’s a lot, for you.’ I told him I was going for a wander to the charity shops. I told him I fancied some fresh air. I currently feel as fresh as a daisy that’s been trampled on by a muddy welly. ‘What’s the weather like out there?’

‘Glorious. Boiling.’

He nods and reaches for his headphones. He doesn’t want to talk further, which is probably for the best. I won’t end up telling him I’ve just been bare-faced lying to a TFL-endorsed counsellor who then rumbled me, or that I pretended I’d seen someone commit suicide so I could go and chat to a complete stranger.

I plonk down in my chair, slip off my flip-flops. I take out my phone and my own headphones – I need music; I need solace. It’s time for a bit of Janis: ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. I sit back and allow the force of that woman’s voice to wash over me. That’s better. Janis was also bullied at school, you know – called a pig and had pennies thrown at her. At the University of Texas she was once declared ‘Ugliest Man on Campus’. She moved to San Francisco to escape, and I used to think I’d go there, one day, to check out her house. We have a lot in common, me and Janis – apart from all the talent, of course. And the drugs.

After a while I check the news. I search for more on Philippa and there’s a small update. Oh, she wasn’t an actress or something glamorous – she worked as a crew member at Ultra Laser in Enfield, one of those places where kids run around in the dark firing neon beams at each other from plastic guns. This is quite different to what I imagined. My vision of her needs adjusting. I wonder if she got depressed working in the blackness all the time. If she got tired of putting on a smiley, energetic front for all those kids. Maybe she came out of there, after each shift, blinking into the light and wondering if this was all there was … I feel even sadder for her. She was so young. Janis Joplin died in her twenties, too – a member of the tragic ‘27 Club’ of Cobain, Winehouse, Morrison and the like. In her case, a heroin overdose. I realize I have lived almost twenty years longer than all of them, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it.