Morag thumps in and tears roughly at Jess’s hair to snap it from Flo’s gnarled fingers. With limited success. The scuffle progresses into a clumsy, humiliating catfight between the three women: two carers fighting an elderly, disabled dementia patient contained within a wheelchair.

When Jess is eventually freed, a flushed Morag dusts Jess’s uprooted hair from the palms of her hands while glaring at her new colleague, as if it is she who is at fault. ‘What I just tell ya! Jesus.’

Dazed, Jess bends to right the jug.

The motion it instigates is nothing but a blur at the edge of her vision as Flo thrusts forward from the waist and swipes a bony fist at Jess’s face.

CRUNCH.

The punch knocks Jess’s head from east to west. White noise and bright flashes shatter her awareness of the room and her position within it. She staggers from the chair, then crumples. Dazed from the blow, she recovers enough to find herself sat on her backside on the wet carpet, her eyes wide with shock and hair in disarray. She can only gape in horror and disbelief at Morag and then Flo, the two figures backgrounded by what resembles a seldom visited museum.

When she shakes off her concussed stupor, she lurches to her feet and races from the room, her tatty hair extending wildly.

8

Jess holds up her makeup mirror with palsied fingers but can do little more than scrape at strands of hair in an attempt to flatten them. Inside the magnifying mirror, the scar that disfigures her mouth looms bigger and uglier.

Can I stay with Mummy today?

One hand pressed against the counter for support, the second across her disfigured mouth, Jess muffles her distress so that Morag won’t hear.

And hither comes that consuming image of Izzy as an infant, standing inside a baby-walker in the doorway of the small kitchen in their flat. A vivid memory from early motherhood, and never welcome when recalled. Izzy is crying hard. Real tears upon a face red and creased with the confused terror that a child feels harder than anyone. And beyond the recollection of her infant’s urgent cries, she hears the football match that was playing on the television in the next room.

A blood-sodden tea towel discarded on a kitchen counter.

A knocked-out human tooth at the bottom of a metal sink.

Jess sniffs, dabs her eyes with the back of her hands, then a sleeve. Takes a deep breath that shudders. Closes her eyes and counts to ten before turning for the door.

Embarrassed, her composure frail and posture stiff, she returns to the living room.

Flo watches the garden as if nothing unusual has occurred.