“What are you going to do with the papers?” pressed the lady. “Wallpaper your room?” A woman further back in the queue supressed a chuckle, but Veronica felt a stab of sympathy for the boy.

“They’re for my mum,” said Dominic. The back of his neck had flushed red.

“Then better for her to buy them herself,” replied the lady. “Sorry, but I have a duty of care.”

Veronica noticed Dominic floundering, his feet moving, his fists clenching, and she was about to offer to purchase the papers for him, when, “Fucking stupid,” he declared, loud enough this time for everybody to hear.

The lady didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth to respond, then closed it again, and by the time she’d formulated a rebuttal, Dominic was long gone, slamming the door as he stormed out of the shop.

In the company of reliable Primrose Hill sympathisers, the lady now put away her reproach and smiled with incredulity at Veronica. “As if it’s really for his mum,” she said. Her head shook gently in a tilted, slow movement, as though to convey her sadness about the state of the world, or at least its youth. “What mother would actually send her child to buy cigarette papers?”

Veronica agreed, adding the woman next door to her list of mothers who, despite their own suffering, did not deserve the gift of a child.

Simone

Terry is all smiles. Simone watches from the window as, in the summer sun, he returns from an afternoon at the pub and stumbles pleasantly into the flat. Dominic is already home with her papers and is actually doing his homework on the living room table. Terry slaps his head in jovial greeting before throwing Jasmine into the air and settling onto the sofa with her on his lap. He turns the TV up to high volume. It has been gently playing Peppa Pig for Jasmine but now erupts with the vicious arguments of a panel show – something about trade unions that Simone can’t follow but the people on the TV, and Terry, seem impassioned by. The noise is deafening. Simone leans back against the window. She is smoking a joint. Ordinarily she’ll only have one a day, usually in the evening, but this is already her second. Through the roar of the TV, Dominic pushes his homework angrily into a pile and looks over to her, waiting for her to say something, to do something. With what she hopes is sympathy, she returns his stare, but remains in her pleasant fog.

There’s a sheet of 20th Century poems on the top of Dominic’s pile. He used to make up poems, trying to set them to self-taught chords on the guitar that was once his father’s. The instrument smelled of wood and smoke and something else indiscernible that still conjured him, and Simone used to watch Dominic breathing that in, savouring the man he surely couldn’t remember, caressing the strings he couldn’t really play. Until Terry sold it one day for a tenner.