She was efficient, scooping up paper towels as she marched to my desk. She wrapped my finger, gripped it tight, ‘so it clots and stops bleeding,’ she murmured. But I didn’t want it to stop. My eyes swam with tears and she put her free arm around me and pulled me close.

We stayed there like that for a while, my small hands digging into her shoulders, until the other kids grew impatient and bored.

I walked to and from school on my own, even at five years old. There was only my mum at home, and in the mornings she didn’t function well enough to walk with me. When the final bell rang, it was her busiest time of day, so she didn’t walk with me then either.

My home was a thin house in a street filled with other thin houses. They were all joined together, with a gaping black hole between every other home that led to an even thinner back yard. When I came home from school, I fitted my key in the lock, shoved the door open (it swelled and stuck most days) and stood in the hallway, staring up towards the top of the stairs.

There was a room there on the landing, Mummy’s room, and if the door was closed I was to wait in the back yard. Today it was closed – it was most days – so I made my way through the narrow hall and into the tiny kitchen. Reaching up, I unlocked the back door and then sat down on the step, still with my coat on.

While I waited for my mum to be finished, I pulled off the plaster that Miss Fairfield had so kindly and tenderly put on my cut. I looked closely at it. Miss Fairfield was right: it had stopped bleeding.

I heard a thump upstairs and looked at the ceiling. She would be done soon. Up on the worktop was a fork left over from last night’s dinner, or maybe even the night before. I grabbed it, and with the prongs I dug at the cut on my finger. Soon, blood was seeping out again.

There was talk in the hallway now as my mother said goodbye to her friend. The front door closed and I put the fork back, now with blood on it as well as the dried and crusted clumps of potato.

‘Mummy,’ I said, as she came into the kitchen.

She looked down at me as though surprised to see me there, and wrapped her dressing gown around her, tying the belt tight across her middle.

‘Look, Mummy,’ I said. I held up my hand, the blood trickling down to my elbow to drip on the lino floor.

She grabbed it, let it go almost immediately and moved over to the kettle.