His raised voice triggers Jess’s panic. She doesn’t know what to do. Her body begins to shake as if in a prelude to a seizure. She struggles to breathe.

Outside on the lawn, Izzy is inexplicably standing on her head for the first time in her life, smiling and haloed by sunlight. ‘Flo! Look! Look! Mummy! Daddy!’

Flo inexplicably and effortlessly slips her hands out of her restraints, as if those lumpy extremities are mice that have flattened their skeletal structures to scurry through a narrow pipe. She raises those old hands above the chair’s armrests and rotates her wrists so that her hands depict twin wheel sigils in the air before her, rolling anticlockwise.

Tony steps away from the wheelchair and turns to the garden. When he catches sight of his deliriously happy daughter, tears fill his eyes. From rage to love. Just as quickly, his expression blanks again as instability and a powerful internal maelstrom resume their hold. When he returns to Jess, his face is bloodless and moist with sweat, his expression tense, committed.

Jess backs away. ‘You can’t come near either of us.’

Tony pounces and seizes Jess’s arm. She flinches, cowers down, her hands protecting her scarred mouth. ‘Don’t. Please, Tony. Don’t.’

Tony’s enraged face closes. One fist is clenched and he’s struggling to restrain himself. He drags Jess across to his rucksack. When he unclenches his fist he dips that hand inside the bag and withdraws a length of coloured cord. And a knife. ‘If I ain’t having her, you ain’t either. There’s another way for us all to be together.’

They stare at each other and Jess at once recognises the terrible purpose in Tony’s eyes. She swallows and shakes her head and whispers, ‘No. Tone. No.’

‘It’s that time, love. We’re there now. All of us. You brought us here.’

Flo begins to rock back and forth while staring intently at nothing in the room. At the end of her extended arms, her hands open and her palms turn to face the ceiling. ‘Erce. Erce. Erce.’

Tony releases Jess’s arm, turns and slaps Flo’s old head hard. ‘Fuck off, I said! Fucking die already! Bitch!’

Jess is on her feet and running from the room.

Tony glances at the garden where oblivious Izzy capers and cartwheels delightedly. Then he turns and pursues Jess.

Jess arrives at the front door and yanks the handle. It won’t open because Tony has already put the catch on and locked them all inside. She futilely slaps a hand against the door then turns and races into the dead-end of the darkened dining room.

Tony strides across the hallway. Behind him, in the distant living room, Flo’s freed hands draw a bigger circle anticlockwise. And above Tony’s head, the new light bulb implodes.