Simone stays where she is. She shakes her head at Jasmine as if to say ‘Silly Daddy’, and takes out a cigarette.

Dominic hates her smoking. He’s eleven now and says less about it, but she can picture him aged seven or eight, eyes frightened like a rabbit, pleading with her to stop, thrusting a flyer he’d found in the doctor’s office into her yellowed hands. Back then she’d thought that his panic was hilarious. Terry did too. They’d both been high on something and had laughed on that for hours.

Simone flaps her hand now as though this might drive the memory away, but all it does is make her drop ash over herself. With the cigarette she is still smoking. Despite her son.

It wasn’t for Dominic that Terry gave in to the idea of moving. It wasn’t even for her. In the end it seemed only that he was trying to spite something. But Simone took it running.

“What’s the point of my giving you a proper kitchen?” his voice comes again. “Can’t cook, and now you can’t even find the intellect to put a bowl away right. You are a dense one, Simone, aren’t you? Jesus. Look at this.”

Again, Simone shakes her head at her daughter, and notices that Jasmine has stopped playing with her princesses. Not as in she has put them away or moved onto something else, but as in she has frozen, one doll still grasped by the hair in her left hand. She did this a few days ago too when she cracked her head on the kitchen table. Simone noticed it then because it was eerie to look at. The child had entirely stopped moving, stopped blinking even – from shock, she’d reasoned. But this time there is no head injury. Simone looks at her daughter intently. “What’s up Jassy?” she says. The girl still doesn’t move. Balancing her cigarette on an ashtray, Simone kneels right next to her and clicks her fingers in front of her face. Jasmine barely blinks. A little roughly, Simone takes the princess out of Jasmine’s hand, but there is still no movement. She is about to pick Jasmine up when Terry appears at the bedroom door.

“Well? You coming to clean this up then?”

“Can’t you see to it, Tel?” Simone protests, still watching her unmoving child, but she gets up.

“Brainless place to put a bowl.”

Simone follows Terry down the corridor and enters the kitchen. She sees the bowl that has smashed, and instinctually, she laughs. “That wasn’t me, Tel. Must be one of your ex’s. I haven’t touched that shelf.”

As soon as she utters the words, she realises that Terry is looking at her with a foreboding intensity. This alone wouldn’t be unsettling – Terry’s always been intense, it was one of the things that first drew her to him and it shoots often through his eyes: that penetrating blueness, dotted unpredictably with mischief and passion. She’d felt so special at the start – she the only one to see the softness in the blue. But today Terry’s eyes have a hue of red about them. The skin underneath is dark and puffy. His sometimes soft, wispy hair is thin and flat against his head. He hasn’t showered. A few days ago he went on a binge and hasn’t scored since. She should have noticed all this sooner.