It was perfect.

She ordered Coke and vodka, and then just vodka, and it was great.

Her phone beeped in her pocket.

You appear to be above your recommended alcohol limit. Would you like to browse our range . . . ?

She turned it off, buried it deep.

Some guy leered at her.

Someone tried to buy her a pint.

She called someone a cunt, and found herself hypnotised by the bingo machine, and one of the serving girls, a child with freckles and greasy skin, asked her if she needed a cab home, and she didn’t, she just wanted another drink. In the end, the pub manager threw her out. He was a nice man, who smiled as he held her arm and murmured, “I know luv, I know, but thing is luv I think you’re hurting yourself and I just can’t stand by and let you hurt yourself, you know luv? Yeah, here you go, luv, here you go, now where do you need to get to, because I can’t just let you be sick in the street, can I? OK, just let it out luv, just let it out . . . ”

There was one bus from Martin’s Heron every fifty minutes.

She fell asleep on it and woke up in the bus station with the driver shouting at her.

She got off the bus and was sick in the bushes behind the loos.

Stayed there for a while, just sitting in a white rectangle of light on the narrow little strips of plastic in the bus shelter designed to be too uncomfortable for loiterers, too crooked for the homeless to pass out on. It occurred to her that it was late, and the streets were quiet – so quiet. In London, that kind of quiet was frightening. It was the quiet where the unknown monsters lurked, where the shadows who stalked you with hoods down and metal in their hands liked to play, whispering between the uncaring houses and padlocked shutters of a city gone to sleep.

Here, it was just silence, ordinary as tar, and if people stopped to think about it, perhaps they would be afraid, but mostly they closed their eyes and closed their ears and closed their minds to the silence, and knew that any screaming would just be the kids having a practical joke.

At last, she let herself feel a little afraid, and cold, and sick, and guilty.

She walked home, and jumped at every whisper of the old oak leaves, at the far-off rushing of a passing car. The light was on in the kitchen, the TV on in the living room, the grey-blue light playing over the venetian blinds across the front windows. It was late for her mum to still be up, but sometimes she forgot to turn the TV off. There was a pan of tomato sauce boiled to a geological crust, and the heat still on. The kitchen sweated steam, an unnatural disorder to the quiet of Karen’s home. There was a trilling coming from the bottom of the stairs where Karen’s phone had fallen along with her dressing gown. There was no reason for either to be there; if as a child Harmony had left her shit lying around like this, she would have got a right telling off.