‘I don’t know.’ I sat up straighter and rubbed a hand through my hair, which was sticking up all over my head. ‘I just feel like you’re being really weird and distant right now. Things have been strange between us since the festival.’

‘For God’s sake, Elliott.’ She was hissing now, clearly not wanting her parents to hear. ‘You get pissed and almost injure me and I’ve been ill! Then we have bricks through the window in the middle of the night, and you accuse me of being weird for not wanting to be home! Maybe I feel safer here!’

I was blindsided by this. She’d managed to sidestep the question and make me feel guilty all at once. And she hardly ever used my full name like that. I felt childishly chastised.

‘Well,’ I said as a huge wave of tiredness hit me. ‘Are you staying the night there?’

A heavy sigh on the other end of the phone.

‘I think I probably am.’

‘Right,’ I said briskly. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then. Give my love to your mum and dad.’

‘Love back from them,’ she said, her voice small now. ‘See you tomorrow.’

When I came off the phone I sat in the darkening room for a few minutes. It felt like nothing in my life was under control right now. Work was stressful, I had made a weird and inexplicable enemy … and now Anya was becoming increasingly distant.

I thought back to the day I got the festival tickets, earlier that summer, I’d sailed down the hill on my bike, bathed in sunshine, feeling like the King of the World. It felt so long ago now.

IRENE

As Irene looked through the window at the thickening jumble of buildings, she tried to remember the last time she had been to London, or even on a train.

Was it when she brought the boys to go to Madame Tussauds all those years ago? It hadn’t been an easy day in the end. Liam couldn’t stop bouncing excitedly in his seat. There had been his incessant questions (‘Will we see Gazza? And Lineker?’ ‘Will the wax people in the Chamber of Horrors come alive?’). Michael had got annoyed that Liam was kicking his seat and they’d ended up scrapping and knocking over Irene’s cup of coffee, so it went all over her magazine and ruined it. She could still recall the disapproving looks from other passengers as she shouted at the boys to behave.

When they got there, the queues had been so long that the boys had bitterly complained about the wait. She couldn’t even remember much about the exhibition in the end, beyond Michael teasing Liam about being scared in the Chamber of Horrors and Liam bursting into noisy tears.

She smiled now as she thought about it. Always so noisy and stressful with those kids. She never had a moment to think.