‘I’ll get you a dressing gown, Mum,’ I said, and hurrying to my room, I snatched my own off the back of the door. I sidled back into her room, trying to hold my breath as I edged towards her.

I put the gown over her thin shoulders. The curve of her back was punctuated by bumps, and I could count every part of her spine. As I touched her, her skin rose in goosebumps and her eyes slid sideways to look at me. Here was a woman who was broken beyond repair, and yet a stone sat in my chest where my heart should have been.

The man had a strap around her upper arm: blood pressure check, I thought at first, and then I smelled a familiar scent, tart, like burning vinegar. It was the second man, coming back upstairs, carrying a tin, a tea towel wrapped around it.

Ignoring me, he set the tin down on the bedside table. From his pocket he withdrew a needle; swiftly he placed it in the tin and sucked up the fluid, passing the syringe to the man next to my mother.

I heard the sharp intake of breath, belatedly realised it came from me. The veins on my mother’s arms stood to attention, erect and eager to receive, and I found my voice, found myself. Darting over to the man, I knocked the needle from his hands.

It fell to the floor, landing in the puddle of shit. He grimaced, and with thumb and forefinger, picked it up. As he slid it into her arm, into the very vein that was shrieking for it, I put my hands over my face and sank to my knees.

‘Carl?’ I said. ‘Carl sent you?’

They didn’t answer me, and my mother smiled and hissed out unintelligible words as she laid her head back against the bed.

They removed the lock from the door. I watched as the paint flaked and drifted down to the floor. The first man slipped the lock into his pocket and moved past me.

He paused, and leaned his face very close to mine.

‘Leave her alone,’ he said, the only words he had spoken to me.

Leave her alone.

As though she were the victim here, and this was how I should be expected to live. I slumped down into a crouch and put my head in my hands.

I had to get out. I had to forge a life for myself that was as far away from here as possible. Because there was no fixing this; the situation wouldn’t get better, no matter what I did. Two more years, then I would be sixteen and I could legally leave. I could leave right now, I realised, but I wasn’t stupid. With no money and nobody to run to, I would end up on the streets. Eventually I would become the woman on the floor in front of me.

Two more years…