As we walked past the field, the sun was burning to death, so low that we could almost look right at it. Ted clung to me, and it was terrifying, when you thought about it: a ball of fire so close to our home.

The house had, in recent years, started to seem like a personal friend of mine, something close to a lover, a surface that had absorbed so many hours of my life, my being soaked into its walls like smoke. I could easily imagine it winking at us as we walked towards it, its windows so obviously eyes, the closed, discreet straightness of its back-­door mouth. Even though I had been there all day, I looked forward to feeling it again: the calm, automated warmth of central heating, the steady presence of its walls.

When we got in, the sun’s orange light was moving to the house’s edges, up the curtains, ebbing away. The boys collapsed onto the sofa, their hands already seeking a remote. I was always liberal about television; I don’t know if I would have survived otherwise, without the children’s thoughts separated from my own, peeled away and placed in a box. When Ted was a baby and Paddy a toddler, I used to put it on for hours in the afternoon, the little jingles joining my heartbeat, becoming part of me. Even years later, when I heard the music of the programmes Paddy liked back then, it seemed sinister. You are a bad mother, sang the talking monkeys, the purple giraffes. You have fucked it aaaaaa-­ll up.

Paddy was always capable of watching, calmly and quietly, without getting bored or distracted. In the early days, it had given me time to feed Ted, those long sessions that newborns need, sucking and sucking, the regular rhythm of his little mouth, Paddy breathing slowly next to me, feeding on TV.

Now, after school, I spent my afternoons as a kind of waitress, and I didn’t mind it. Maybe it reminded me of the times I did actual waitressing, and coffee-­making, and floor-­sweeping, for money. I liked those jobs, the simplicity of them, the way they made me feel so tired I became transparent, completely open to the world. Tiredness was different when nothing was expected of me: it was a pleasure, sliding into a leather booth after work with my colleagues. Drinking so much I could hardly see.