It was no wonder really. How could they understand her reality when they had no comprehension of it? They’d thought – when she was seventeen, when she’d started drinking, when she’d met Noah, when she’d gone off the rails – that that was when she’d sunk from the dizzying heights of civility. But it hadn’t been like that at all. Noah was normal. His family were normal. The people who lived in his building were normal. Same as them. There was nothing, in the end, that was so foreign or alien or exotic about these people who lived on the other side of towering walls, other than the walls themselves. The realisation of this had been a little disappointing to Simone at the beginning. Wrapped up in Noah’s family, she had at last the feeling of connection for which she’d been yearning; but in the months that followed, after the first grand gesture of her pregnancy and departure from home, she hadn’t felt as though she was doing anything so desperately wild anymore, anything that would really stick it to her parents. She had swapped a clean, private flat for one in disrepair, ease for urgency; but she had good people, she had support, she couldn’t blame the estate for the pain she continued to feel.

Perhaps that was why she had let herself sink lower. Perhaps it was intentional. A way to shock them. A way to shock herself. A way to attach her hurt to something tangible.

Terry was tangible. Terry was at last the archetypal estate boy her parents imagined. And there when she was at her lowest. Seeming to need her. Seeming to understand what she needed. Seeming able to sweep everything else away.

Simone rubs her head. It feels groggy. She has not eaten and in the growing heat, with the lack of sleep, and the after-effects of alcohol, her legs feel like jelly. Pungency wafts from the canal into her nostrils, but at least there is shade down here, and the cyclists whizzing past her fan sharp bursts of welcome air into her face. A number of pedestrians overtake her. Her father used to walk quickly too, his legs, or sense of purpose, sturdier than hers alone. Still, if she sticks to her pace, she will not be late, and she continues on, wondering if Dominic has managed to change Jasmine’s nappy and give her some cereal; and wake Terry.

She does not hear him behind her. Not even a second early. She does not see his arms reaching. She has no idea he is there until her body is yanked forcefully around the side of a stone, Nash archway, and her throat is gripped within his hands.

This is not the first time she has been pinned against a Camden wall, staring into blistering blue.

It was overcast, the first time, the sky seeped in grey, like a pencil smudge somebody hasn’t bothered to properly erase. But Terry’s eyes had been bright, and mad, and piercing. Twenty minutes earlier, they had set off for the courthouse together, chatting jovially. By then, he’d been sleeping on her couch for three weeks, and they’d been flirting a little, staying up late to chat, or party. He hadn’t asked her for the alibi, she’d volunteered it, casually over a pint; but she’d liked the way that he seemed surprised by the suggestion, like a child who’s given a present unexpectedly, and it made her want to give herself to him more, again and again. If she took his word for it, he’d been set up anyway; but even if that wasn’t the case, who cared really if he had robbed somebody at knifepoint? He hadn’t hurt them. And everybody did things sometimes that they didn’t mean, didn’t intend, didn’t imagine they’d ever stoop to. The forces that drove people couldn’t be explained the way her parents imagined, in black and white, in scrawls made in ink against paper. Terry’s hand had squeezed at her throat as though he were extracting the juice from an orange. “You’re not gonna make a mug of me in there, are you?”