Simone stares at the closed wooden door. The scratching is there, like a mouse between floorboards. She is sixteen. Her father’s pen works to fill the pages from which he’ll speak tomorrow, delivering a lecture, enlightening a class, filling his students with the passion he does not hold for his wife and cannot muster for his daughter. If she knocks, he won’t answer. If she enters, he will usher her away. If she stands in the hallway and screams and hits the walls and knocks over photographs, perhaps he will emerge for a moment and look at her with disappointment, or worse, puzzlement, confirming how unknown she is to him. If she keeps it up for long enough, perhaps her mother too will come out from her bedroom where she might be sleeping, is always sleeping, the research fellowship having disappeared without explanation some years back. Then, her mother will stare at her disdainfully, as though perturbed by the intrusion of sound. There is no point in any of these things. So Simone moves from the hallway into her bedroom, where she closes her own door, and gently scratches her skin instead of paper. She watches the way the blood trickles past her wrist, taking comfort in the certainty of that, proof that her actions do cause an effect, even if only on herself.

It is winter, but she wears short sleeves around the flat, waiting for somebody to notice. The multiplying marks on her arms are like breadcrumbs, but her mother leaves her dinner for her in the oven, and her father eats his behind his closed wooden door, and they miss the clues they might have otherwise used to track back to her. Or to each other. They are sleeping separately. There is no spare room, but Simone notices the blankets hidden behind the sofa and the way that the living room has come to have a slept-in morning stench. Nobody has told her anything. Nobody speaks at all. She feels as though she will be deafened by the silence.

At school there is a new student who doesn’t yet know that Simone is not one of the popular girls. They find themselves next to each other in A Level English and she asks Simone where you can go around here to party. Simone doesn’t know, but she pretends she does and takes the new girl, Kara, to a pub she walks past sometimes and seems busy. Kara looks around disdainfully as they enter. The clientele is far older than they are. There should be blow-dried girls in flared jeans, and men ordering copious rounds of vodka shots. There should be trendy light fittings, and menus describing humorously named cocktails. Instead, a gang of long-haired bikers look up from their beers. The other sticky tables are populated similarly disappointingly: middle-aged alcoholics; younger, pasty-skinned girls unsophisticatedly revealing both leg and middle; guys with shaved heads and gold teeth, all of them laughing too loudly, too coarsely. Kara goes to the bar and orders a gin and tonic. Simone, who has never drunk alcohol, copies her. The liquid feels at once cool and hot. Within a second, she can feel it flowing through her veins. “You sure about this place?” asks Kara, and Simone assures her that usually it’s really buzzy and maybe they’re just there a bit early, and anyway the drinks are cheap. Kara nods but isn’t convinced. When she has finished her drink, she pretends she isn’t feeling well and suggests they leave. Simone laughs loudly at this and tells her to go. By now, the gin is pumping hard, she can feel it coursing through her.