‘It’s bloody hot in here,’ I remark.

The Palladian window is closed again. I walk over and open it, letting in the noise and the smells of Chalk Farm. I know Dad will grumble, like he always does, but he used to love standing at this window, with it wide open, and listening to life on the street below. He used to sit by it on stormy evenings, absorbing the sound of the rain. Now he likes the window closed and the flat quiet; far from the world.

‘I like it shut,’ he complains.

‘I know, but we need to let some air in. It resembles a fusty old garden shed in here.’

‘I didn’t think you’d be able to talk, after the injection,’ he says.

I roll my eyes. I have to be as silent as he is blind.

‘I’ll just go and get changed.’

By just go and get changed, I mean, take off my make-up now there’s no one to see my face.

I use baby wipes. It usually takes about six or seven of them to remove my thick foundation and expose my heart-shaped monstrosity. I have it down to a fine art. We only have one mirror and it’s in our bathroom; it’s badly lit in here, but that’s OK. My birthmark is already angry-looking as I disturb it with my wiping and rubbing, my unveiling and my disclosing. I don’t need to see it clearly. It’s not like I don’t know it’s there. Yet, sometimes it still surprises me. Even after all these years. I might catch sight of it in a mocking shop window or in a bastard mirror I’m not expecting – at the clinic, say, or at Dad’s doctors’ surgery, and think, Oh, look at that. That’s horrible.

A strawberry birthmark. How anodyne and Enid Blyton and Pollyanna that sounds. It isn’t. It’s raspberry red and asymmetrical and bumpy and is a bugger to blend into the rest of my face with that thick, thick foundation, now deposited on baby wipes. Most days I still feel really despondent about it. Every day I just want to hide from the world and never come out.

That feels better, though. My face can breathe. I throw the browned baby wipes in our little pedal bin and head back to the sitting room and my bag, to open one of the letters I picked up downstairs. Oh, it’s another architectural magazine, wanting to do a feature on where we live. There’s a lot of interest in the only flat created inside a London tube station.

‘Someone else wants to talk to us about The Palladian,’ I say. ‘Another magazine.’