Then there was more blood, trickling out of my mother’s arm. I reached for a tissue and wiped at it, then pressed it against her arm until the blood stopped. In the messy drawer in the cabinet I found a plaster, and I stuck it to where it looked like the blood had come from.

I collected up the belt, the spoon and the needle and carried them all through to the kitchen, placing them beside her packet of cigarettes. Then I returned to the living room, where I draped a blanket over her inert form and got to tidying up the rest of the room.

All the while, she slept on.

It was an awful existence, no way for a teenage girl to live. But up until then it had been bearable. I kept the house clean, along with myself, and washed our clothes and ironed them and changed my mother’s bed sheets. I didn’t mind doing any of that.

My mother didn’t trouble me, didn’t bug me to do homework or lecture me about the dangers a young girl might face. She never kept track of my movements, and because of all this, I never rebelled like so many of my classmates. A threat had never been there until now.

Until Carl.

He gave my mother heroin. That was the brown stuff and why she needed the needle and the spoon and the belt, and from the snippets of conversation I heard between them, it was really, really expensive. Carl took ‘payment in kind’, and because he could name his price, sometimes he took more than the use of her body. Money that we kept in a jar for electricity vanished, as did pieces of my mother’s jewellery. She had never done heroin until he came into her life. He had introduced her to it, and I knew it was dangerous. And I soon learned that she couldn’t live without it.

‘Don’t let him in,’ I pleaded with her after he’d taken all the cash in the house.

She stared at me. ‘Where else am I going to get it from?’ she asked. ‘This is the best deal, he doesn’t always take money.’

It was unspoken, but that was what I was afraid of. I knew Carl would accept the use of me as payment for Mum’s habit, and I couldn’t – wouldn’t – live like that.

‘Do you have any cash hidden anywhere?’ I asked her.

She shrugged, unable to remember, unable to care.

Later, when she slept, I turned the whole house upside down and came up with forty quid. When she woke, I held it up to her.

‘If he comes, don’t let him in.’ I moved the four ten-pound notes in front of her face. She followed them with her eyes. ‘I’ll get your stuff, just don’t let him in.’