‘It’s a suppository,’ she says, using a heel to kick the empty packet under her seat. ‘Just paracetamol … Don’t worry. We give it like that when we can’t do it orally. She’ll hardly feel it, and we need to bring her temperature down, it’s dangerously high.’

I spit into the bag, gripping the edge of my seat as we lurch around a corner. A machine beeps somewhere. Has it been beeping all the time?

‘You did well to call 999,’ she says as sirens thud overhead. ‘Your sister was having a febrile convulsion. They look worse than they are, but a temperature in the sky like that signals a dangerous infection somewhere. How long’s she been ill?’

Another clatter, my feet flying into the air as we swerve. It’s only then that I notice Kayleigh’s been strapped down on the stretcher, so she hardly moves at all. I swallow bile. Who called 999? It can’t have been Ma, but I know it wasn’t me. It’s the only thing I’m sure of.

‘She’ll get better faster if you talk to me,’ Ambulance Woman says, raising her voice above the siren. ‘Otherwise we just have to guess, and waste time ruling things out.’

She unfolds a massive piece of silver foil, laying it over Kayleigh like a blanket.

‘It’s thermal,’ she says, as if I’d actually asked. ‘Stops her getting too cold or too hot.’

More bile goes down as I look at my sister’s head, plastic mask poking out of her foil wrappings like she’s nothing more than a sausage roll. A screech and a jolt, and we stop, noise flooding into the back of the ambulance as the doors pop open, two other people grabbing the back of the stretcher.

‘Female, three years old at a guess, febrile convulsion, stable,’ the woman shouts as she follows the stretcher out, wheels clattering down the ramp. I stumble across the ambulance bay, trying to make sense out of the words flying back and forth over my foil-wrapped sister: seizure this, fever that, something about a rash? Every time I reach out to try and hold the stretcher it judders away 105from my hand, stupid silver foil blanket crackling in the wind like it’s laughing at me.

‘Sister here’s the next of kin.’ The woman jerks her head at me as the hospital doors swing open. ‘Mother still at the scene…’