All she can do is glide.

Glide.

Ignore the splintering ice beneath her, slow in its expansion.

Hope she doesn’t fall into the cracks.

And then Noah goes and gets himself killed in a car crash. Drunk at the wheel. And she cannot bear it. She cannot glide. She cannot balance. She cannot breathe. And everything collapses around her.

Lewa pounds on her door.

Lewa demands to see Dominic.

Lewa cries as Simone has never witnessed before.

Dominic cries too, for Lewa, from the other side of wood.

But Simone cannot bring herself to answer. If she does, then Lewa will judge her: for the overflowing bins; for Dominic’s unclean clothes; for not taking her turn. She will stand there and judge. As her own parents did. And she will do so with Noah’s dark, dreaded hair, and his dancing eyes, and the determined gaze that, perhaps, if it wasn’t for Simone, could have done anything.

“He’s not yours,” Simone tells Lewa eventually, calmly, resolutely through the door, many weeks after the funeral she didn’t attend. “He wasn’t Noah’s either. Couldn’t you tell? Never looked a thing like him.”

A few months later, Simone hears that Lewa has moved to another estate somewhere south of the river.

It is another few months after that, that Simone’s father turns up on her doorstep, her mother cowering in a parked car nearby. Simone is not so much surprised by their appearance, but relieved, as though the necessary thing has finally happened, and she lets them take Dominic for the weekend. Dominic is four years old then and doesn’t know his grandfather at all, but he’ll be alright, she tells him, he’ll be alright, she tells herself. He has to be, because her parents don’t invite her to go with them. Besides, she needs Dominic gone, if only for a day. She needs space again. She needs to scream and she needs space. But she is walled in tight by concrete.

The creeping darkness of the stairwell feels colder. The stench of piss smells stronger. The pumping flesh in her mouth tastes rancid. But he gives her a tenner, and that’s almost enough for half a gram.

“You’re Noah’s bird, aren’t you?” he asks, zipping up his trousers. “Always talked like you was something special, didn’t he? That’s a laugh, innit?”

She wipes her mouth, but stays crouching.

Pressing her hands against the concrete of the playground, Simone stands. Air pushes painfully through her lungs, but she forces herself to breathe deeply. She wishes Terry was there, the sheer force of his presence enough to sweep away her memories. He wouldn’t have agreed with the teachers as she did. At home he’d have swiped Dominic about the legs with the metal end of his belt, and it is for this reason that she did not and will not mention the meeting to him; but here, he would have given the teachers what for.

Simone puts her hands to her face. Her make-up is smudged, but she’ll stop in a café on the way and tidy herself. The staff at the gym won’t notice. It’s an easy part to play. She remembers this one too. She remembers it. All of it, suddenly, with growing colour, free from grey walls. It’s easy. This is nothing.