I picked up the information sheet. The first pill would ‘arrest’ the foetus, it said, and then, twelve to twenty-four hours later, I should start taking the other pills which would cause my body to expel it. One pill to kill, another to purge.

Killing. Was that the right way to think of it? Was it part of my own body or wasn’t it? I couldn’t get it clear in my mind. This action I was about to take lay somewhere between committing murder if you listened to some, and cutting my toenails if you listened to others. Impossible to know how to feel about it.

I retrieved my water bottle from my bag and then popped the first pill out of the blister pack and held it in the palm of my hand. Such a tiny thing. I’d used medical intervention to prevent pregnancy, was this so very different?

Against my better judgement – I hadn’t been going to do it this way, I’d been going to swallow the pill while doing something else, without even thinking about it – I placed my hand low on my abdomen. My hand was warm and comforting. The life there, whatever it was, I felt I had to hold while I did this. I slipped the pill between my lips.

The coating stuck to my tongue. It tasted bitter and chalky and with that taste the sudden realisation of what it actually was struck me and in an instant I spat it out.

There it lay again in the palm of my hand. I grabbed a tissue from beside the bed and dabbed it dry. Tears budded in my eyes. With shaking fingers I replaced the pill back in its blister, smoothed the broken foil down over the top and sealed it over with ancient sticky tape I found in the old desk drawer. I put it back in its carton, and the carton back in the box. I rewrapped the box, but it was like trying to rewrap a present that a dog had mauled.

I leaned down and shoved the package under the bed, pushing it hard to force a pile of random rubbish out of the way.

I sat on the bed and rubbed my face as if by doing that I could rub the mess out of my head that had been put there by Dr Honeycott and the Skip Curry.

I hadn’t told Bette all of Dad’s story of the Skip Curry. I’d left details out – the way my baby Cathy was really sick and needed looking after; the way that the lullaby I sang for her was actually my own favourite song at the time, ‘You Are My Sunshine’; the way I had stroked Mum’s hair while singing it, just like a good mummy should; and the way that Mum had been in the best and deepest sleep she had ever had, like some sort of enchanted princess, and Dad and I had made our beds around her and slept there all night long, a fairytale family camp-out on the kitchen floor.