Mary pulled up outside the office and rummaged for change in her grotty car. There was a parking meter epidemic in Renfield, even though very few residents drove a car – not their own, anyway. She’d tossed her fury to the wind re parking years ago, but it boomeranged now as she scraped a twenty-pence piece from the floor and picked off the brown substance coating it. She had to pay? In this wasteland, near a sewage plant. Where no-one even had a car except the council army that had long occupied the area – the Stasi soldiers who paced the High Street at lunchtime, lanyards swinging from their necks. She counted out two quid in silver, put it in the meter, and opened the boot. Tuna was plentiful – no-one wanted that – but she was running low on baked beans and UHT milk. As usual for the last week or two, she left the boot open, and stuck her laminated PLEASE HELP YOURSELF sign on the number plate.

Mary was vibrating, she was an enormous walking Just Ears. Her son had just been arrested for downloading abusive images of children. Right now, he was handcuffed in the back of a van. To the drivers, he was the scum of the earth. In prison, he’d be abused and beaten. In court tomorrow, men’s rights activists and Renfield Star journalists would jot down details to embellish and spread. Online, he’d be the evil monster we must all watch out for. He’d have to register every year. He wouldn’t be allowed to have his dog. Marty! He wouldn’t be allowed to have Marty. The law firm would sack him. If found guilty, he’d never practise law, or get any kind of job, ever. He wouldn’t be allowed near children and if he went near a woman, social work would put a stop to it. He’d go to groupwork with the likes of Jimmy McKinley, and maybe he’d learn a thing or two, make some pals.

She stopped before the front doors because she couldn’t breathe. ‘I must not think about that. I must not think about that,’ she repeated, definitely out loud, because a skinny client was offering her a cigarette.

He lit it for her.

His kindness, as well as the deep, smoky breathing, calmed her. She had arrived at the right place, the concrete box she’d worked in for thirty years, where chaos was expected and unhappiness the currency, where she was the goody who worked with the baddies, where poverty made her feel rich and despair made her feel blessed, where her colleagues were her mates, her boss her confidante, and where crises always blew over.