“You’re right,” she said. “They should have got me a lot further. That’s why I’ve got a job.”

“Fuck off,” Terry laughed again. But now Dominic was looking at her with a new expression. Was that perplexity she saw still around the edges, or admiration?

“I’m not joking, Tel. I’ve got a job at a gym down Camden. Just reception work for now, but you know, it’s a start.”

For a moment, Terry said nothing. He just sat and looked at her as though she was talking a foreign language, or had come home with a new haircut and he didn’t recognise her for it. The pause was unsettling. Still, Simone stepped with an attempt at boldness into it.

“So, homework,” she told Dominic.

Dominic looked first to Terry, and then back to her. Compared to Jasmine, Dominic always seemed so grown up to Simone; but in that brief moment, navigating the intensity of Terry’s disdain and the determination of his mother, he looked painfully small.

“Fuck off,” Terry exploded suddenly, with forced, loud laughter, slapping Dominic on the shoulder in an effort to make him join in. Dominic smiled awkwardly. Then to her, in quieter tones: “Are you undermining me? Are you trying to say something? Speak, woman.”

“He’s my son,” she muttered.

Simultaneously, they both looked at Dominic, but it was too dangerous now for the child to move in either direction, and Simone knew it. She wished desperately that she could take it all back. Why on earth had she picked a fight? She really was a dense one, just like Terry told her. But it was too late to unravel. And just this one time, she didn’t want Dominic to see her back down. Tension threaded itself around them and knotted tight. For what seemed like an unfathomably long time, nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody did anything. Until, like an angel from heaven, Jasmine burst into tears, and Dominic leaped to pick her up. The two of them bustled away.

Terry continued to stare, almost as though he was daring Simone now, now they were alone, to keep looking back at him; but she didn’t dare. She lowered her eyes and turned away, walking hurriedly to the kitchen area where she got out the chips and took a pizza from the fridge, and twenty minutes later served it up in front of the TV.

For the next three hours, Terry didn’t say another word. He only looked at her, and looked at her. And then went out with a fistful of his father’s money without saying or doing anything.

It was much later, when he was back from wherever he’d been to get a fix, and she was lying in bed in foolish sleep, that he woke her with a blow to her jaw, and then pulled her by the hair into the living room where he first berated her with all the words he hadn’t come to earlier, then chose, with what she was sure was calculation, the sole wall that adjoined the new neighbours’ house, to throw her against, again and again.