When I reach the top of the hill, I’m in the zone. The zone is when you get into your running rhythm and forget where you are. I like being in the zone. It feels safe, like being under the table when I want to calm down. But there’s a car horn hooting, hooting, hooting. I turn my face to see a bright red car and a woman with long ginger hair. It’s Mrs C Eckler, my favourite teacher. She stops, winds down the window and says something about school and athletics and giving me a lift but I’m panicking that I won’t be home before Grandma, who will find out athletics wasn’t on and wonder why I didn’t get home earlier. Panic makes me hear her words in the wrong order and my heart starts thumping. Lots of cars are queuing behind her, hooting their horns. It’s all too much. I accelerate away like Usain Bolt.

The path’s level now. I run past the shops, the newsagent’s, the Indian grocer’s, the Polish deli that had its windows smashed in so there’s cardboard in their place. Someone sprayed graffiti onto it in a foreign language I don’t understand. We buy bread there sometimes because it’s nicer than the bread in the supermarket and the same price. I start to relax now that I can’t hear those cars hooting like an orchestra from hell.

I’m in the centre of town now. I run through the Pound Emporium, even though the floor’s slippery and the flickering overhead lights always give me a headache, and out the other side to the car park, where they sometimes have a market selling bruised fruit. I go this way because there aren’t as many people. I run past the big supermarkets we never go to because Grandma’s leg pains her when she walks more than 200 metres, and on past the industrial estate.

This is the best part of town. Old, grey buildings used by businesses, and no people. It’s the best place to run. The windows look like eyes with no sockets and sometimes big lorries go in making a rumbling noise like they’ve taken over from human beings.

We live in a flat on the other side of the industrial estate in a row of houses nicknamed ‘The Mush-Rooms’. I think they’re called that because the walls are so damp mushrooms grow out of them. Our landlord’s Italian and he doesn’t charge the same rent as the English ones. Most of the people who live there are Nigerian or Polish, except Mrs Leggett, who acts like she owns the place. The houses are terraced, so I can hear what people are saying in the next flat, though Grandma says that’s not possible with old houses. But I can.