Patient after patient was called in, their names whizzing by on the screen in jazzy dotted writing, my mother reading everyone’s name out loud (and commenting in her not untheatrical timbre on possible parentages). By the time her own name sped across the screen, we were pretty much the last people there. With all the excitement of the lettering and the global mix of patients, we had both rather forgotten the nature of the appointment. You’ll be fine, Mum.

We went in to see Dr. Rhys Evans. Anita Rhys Evans. I knew her: she was a mum at the school and the private–public line had merged too much for my liking (I always specified another doctor for my own appointments). It had been embarrassing for both of us on the first day of nursery to lock eyes as we rummaged about in the sandpit searching for plastic toys with Josh and Hannah when the last time we had met she had been rummaging about in my traumatized vagina post placental abruption. Awkward memories of concrete mammaries and septic stitches came back as I blew sand from a plastic tractor. We had further been thrown together in Year One when Josh developed an obsessional crush on her minx of a daughter. I am the saddest man in England, Mummy, he told me coming out of school in tears one day, snot pouring from his nose (not a girlfriend-keeping look, darling). Hannah, the slapper, had been flashing her knickers at Aidan O’Connor. I’m afraid, Josh, Hannah can show her knickers to anyone she likes, I’d said responsibly. (I also had a soft spot for Aidan; he was a fiery kid from the estate who allegedly once told the headmaster to fuck off – hats off, that boy.)