‘Hang on. So, are you saying, Ces…’ I took a deep breath. ‘Are you saying that – what Willow said was right? Is that why she’s just been here?’

We both looked at the girl’s hands, tearing and tearing the saturated tissue into shreds.

‘Ces?’ I prodded gently. ‘She was right – about Zach?’

She looked up at me, her green eyes bloodshot – and she nodded, slowly.

Oh God.

Ruby

As a mother of both a girl and a boy, I’d really had my work cut out to pitch the gender, sex and equality message right.

It was a proverbial minefield I trod anxiously every day.

‘No one just has the right to touch your body without your invitation,’ I told Ali. ‘You get to choose, not them.’

This was something I dearly wished my own mother had shared with me as a youngster.

The memory, clearly, of men touching me when they felt like it: men in nightclubs; builders catcalling from scaffolding until I was scared to walk down a road; and worse – me not always realising it would have been more than OK to tell them to fuck off.

Telling them to fuck off felt, as a teenager in the 1980s, plain rude – especially if they were, as was often the case, men I actually knew – a couple of my dad’s drinking mates; one particularly handsy cousin on my mother’s side, at a family wedding in Blackburn. So I never really said it, though I did try hard to avoid them at all costs.

To Zach, of course, as he grew older, I had to deliver a different message – or rather Jonny and I both had, initially. I had faith in my husband – a fair and decent, if not entirely new man – to pitch it right.

Find someone you like and who likes you, and go from there. Take it slowly, take it gently, never force anything: that was our message.

But then Jonny died as Zach hit puberty.

Sometimes I felt that teaching ‘No means no’ was tantamount to saying, I believe, dear Zach, because you’re male, you have a propensity to be a rapist, an assailant of some description; that it might be possible for you to turn into this. Therefore I must teach you that it is never OK. I must teach you respect before it is too late, because I don’t believe you can know it on your own.

But I just didn’t subscribe at all to the idea of every male being predatory or assumptive: that was ridiculous.

It’s hard to be a feminist mother of boys. It is hard to know and understand the implicit messages of a society that prides itself on being liberal and forward-thinking, but in fact is still so far entrenched in its own patriarchy that it harms women daily, without us even realising. The tentacles pervade so far into ‘normal’ life. But I also felt angry just thinking about it: this assumption that Zach would ever just try to ‘help himself’, that he didn’t implicitly understand that ‘no means no’ without being told it.