The summer stretched ahead like a long, gloomy road. She checked her social media and saw that one of her friends was now in Ibiza posting the most enviable beach selfies, while another was spending a week on a canal boat with her family and kept posting photos of rippling water, sunsets and glasses of wine balanced on the deck. Martha threw her phone on the bed. It wasn’t that she cared massively about social media, but it said a lot about your life when you had nothing at all to post.

She stared out the window. The nearest thing she’d had to excitement in the last few weeks was when a fox had climbed into Mrs. Hartley’s garden and dug up her flower beds. Martha had spent the morning clearing up fox poo so that Mrs. Hartley’s little dog wouldn’t roll in it.

Kicking off her shoes, she balanced her tea on the shelf above the bed and opened her ancient, temperamental laptop. Her hands hovered over the keys. She didn’t even know what job to search for anymore.

Great with laundry, good at cleaning up fox poo weren’t exactly assets.

What she needed was a job that came with accommodation so that she could get away from her family home.

She scrolled through the website.

Someone was looking for a live-in companion, to include full nursing care. What exactly did that entail? Martha, who was horribly squeamish, decided she didn’t want to find out.

A professional couple were offering free accommodation in return for cat sitting, but there was no additional payment. How was she supposed to feed herself? She imagined herself coming home to visit her parents and being so svelte and slim they didn’t recognize her.

She was about to give up when another job caught her eye.

Do you love driving?

Martha closed the laptop and reached for her tea. No, she didn’t love driving. In fact it was no exaggeration to say she loathed driving, and driving loathed her. She’d failed her test five times and eventually passed only because the examiner had been worried about his pregnant wife who had texted in the middle of Martha’s lesson to say that she was having contractions. He’d been so distracted he hadn’t noticed that Martha was in the wrong lane approaching a roundabout, and he hadn’t reacted at all when she’d failed to demonstrate even a hint of skill at reversing. She was used to inducing raw fear in her passengers, including her regular driving instructor, so it had been a relief and a surprise when the examiner had simply nodded as he’d discreetly checked his phone. When he told her that she’d passed she’d had to stop herself from saying, Are you sure?