Her thirteen-year-old came downstairs, his thick mop of hair swinging across his eyes. Sasha grabbed his school tie to yank his face close to hers.

‘Breathe,’ she said.

He opened his mouth wide and let out a foetid breath.

‘Yuck! Go and clean your teeth.’ She spun Denny around and pushed him up the stairs, her son trudging away like a condemned man to the gallows. ‘And brush your hair!’

In the kitchen, she took a last gulp of tepid coffee and chased a shoe around the tile with her foot.

‘Got a fiver?’ Denny came back into the room. There was little evidence to suggest he’d made any attempt to brush his hair; it stuck up every which way.

‘What do you need it for?’

‘We’ve got a geography field trip today so I need to buy lunch.’ He lifted her purse from her bag. ‘I told you about it.’

She grabbed the purse out of his hand. ‘You didn’t tell me about it.’

Denny rolled his eyes. ‘I did.’

‘Don’t act like a sulky teenager, Denny, you’re better than that.’ She pulled out the single note. ‘I’ve only got a tenner.’

He took it quickly. ‘That’ll do.’

‘Don’t snatch.’

Her son lifted a remote at the TV on the wall and the room was filled with the sound of screeching tyres, explosions and gunfire. Cars leapt about on screen, defying all gravitational logic. Sasha could barely hear herself think.

‘That’s an awful lot of noise first thing in the morning.’

‘All my friends are watching it.’

Sasha sipped her coffee. ‘Is it age appropriate?’

‘There’s no fucking in it, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Excuse me?’ she asked sharply, as Kev walked into the kitchen. Her husband was still in his pyjama bottoms and the T-shirt he slept in. There was the lingering ghost of a sleep crease on one unshaven cheek.

‘Shouldn’t you be dressed by now?’ Sasha asked as he poured coffee from the pot, but he trudged out without replying.

Angel appeared at the door with her hands on her hips and said, as if the world was about to end, ‘My hairdryer is gone!’

She was wearing her school uniform, at least, but in the last few months some kind of diabolical transformation machine had been at work on her appearance. Every day there was some alarming new change. A little more make-up was applied, her hair dyed more luridly or moussed higher into the stratosphere, ever longer lashes obscured her eyes. Lately, she’d been talking about getting her tongue pierced. Sasha yearned to take her daughter shopping, to encourage her to buy something nice, but knew Angel would have an almost allergic reaction to every item she suggested.

‘Denny’s hidden it!’ She tugged at her hair, almost in tears. ‘Look how frizzy it is!’