People were getting off, and more people were waiting to get on. There was a little girl with a bicycle, and in fact – she looked again – there were two of them. Ayesha stared because they were identical twins. They were eleven or twelve years old, and they took their cycling seriously. Why weren’t they at school? Both were on the platform, dressed in tight-fitting Lycra, which drew attention to their remarkable, identical skinniness. They wore cycling helmets and they were very beautiful.

People were climbing aboard, and the poor girls had no choice but to wait behind the crowd. They were frightened there wouldn’t be space, and Ayesha could see them pressing their bikes together as if they were one person, reflected, going through exactly the same anxiety in exactly the same way.

Her parents were not coping, of course. She was not coping, and they were not coping – but they were coping better than her gran, who had simply died. Perhaps she would have died anyway, but the relationship between Kristin and his gran had been so intense, and he had loved her in a way Ayesha still found surprising – because he had been a normal, thoughtless, ego-driven boy capable of lying, cheating and even stealing.

He had stolen from the shop close to his school, and been caught. He had been sharp and dangerous, and when she’d held him – when she’d hugged him – she always noticed his bony shoulder, or hard head. He was noisy. He was messy. You knew when he’d been in the kitchen because he left things everywhere, and spilled juice and crumbs because he tried to do too many things at once, like tearing at a packet of something whilst getting the fridge door open with his elbow. Once he’d trodden dog’s mess all through the house because he hadn’t bothered to take off his school shoes.

But he would make a point of speaking to his grandmother every day. He knew – he was sensitive enough to know – that her day could not finish without her seeing him or hearing his voice, and he submitted to being touched by her. He feigned impatience, but submitted, so when he died her little guttering candle of life stood no chance at all. It simply went out. She had not wailed and screamed: she had simply shrunk, and become very still. Her stillness lasted only three weeks, and then she died in her chair.

‘They cope,’ she said.