It was not long after this that she threw a wine glass. It wasn’t at me, just at the wall that was next to me. But even the little bit of the wine in the glass made quite a mess of that wall, and while I ran off to the pub Amy stayed to scrub the stains off, so that the value of the property wouldn’t be diminished. In the morning I heard the front door slam and found she had left for London without me.

*

Mum was never fond of driving, or of teaching, but she drove each day to a secondary school to teach modern languages to depressed children, many of whom would never leave the peninsula where they and their parents had been born.

When the panic attack hit her in the middle of a stretch of dual carriageway, she was two years away from retirement, but at that moment it must have seemed a long way away. Amy and I can only speculate. We both take it as certain that the fact that there was nowhere for her to pull over was a cause of the crash, as well as the reason it was fatal. She had had panic attacks on this same stretch of road before, and usually took a long detour to avoid it. Her head teacher had made her late that night, calling her in to discuss a complaint made by a parent, and she was hurrying to get to a church hall where she had set up a ballroom dancing class, her plan to earn a little bit of money doing something she liked.

Three couples turned up that night, and her dancing partner, Alan. They chatted to each other for a few minutes outside the locked hall, before they decided it was too cold to wait any longer. Alan drove to her house, and then her school, to see if he could find her. The main road out of town was blocked off by the police.

Mum is a cautious driver, she always wears her seat belt. She waits a long time to pull out at junctions. People beeped their horns behind her sometimes, and if I was beside her when they did I would fantasise about smashing their windows.

Because this is what I think happened.