You look suspicious, different tonight, the way you stumble into the room and its cooking smells. The way you twist your mouth at the corner, subconsciously and one hundred percent unaware of how you look, drives me crazy. Also, you look a little grey right now. That thing you do with your eyes - stare off into the distance with one lazy eye a little off-centre, watching with it not quite the same speck of dust dancing before the cracked lampshade as the other eye - also drives me crazy, more so because the only way to get your attention is to jab you in the ribs with an elbow. And my God, you’re skinny now. No-one is quite sure where the rest of you has disappeared to. I want to tell you you look stupid with your eyes gazing through me like that.

You tell us to sit down almost politely, an embarrassed kind of fear in the way you cross one knee over the other before slouching down into the hard wooden kitchen chair before twisting your hands together before wriggling back up the chair to hoik up your slipping baggy jeans (and almost definitely uncomfortable. Which is cool, apparently, until they fall around your ankles and you’re standing skinny in swamping boxers) - this is all very suspicious and not you.

A purple bruise blossoming on your jaw bone. We don’t notice until you point it out. A bloody gum, a leaning-Pisa tooth, which you refuse to show us. And your tale of fierce protection of a girl not even yours, which reminds me a little of medieval knights fighting off dragons (sixteen year old dragons with baggier jeans than yours, flicker flick knives and meatier fists). In the dark cold icy-frost, under yellow mud-hazy streetlights. Which is sweet but stupid, I think as everyone else shouts, to which you react not by throwing around cruel words and kitchen chairs as you usually would, but by gazing off at the lampshade again with an expression of Love Martyrdom.

I know it’s you and not some imposter when you shout FUCK OFF after they tell you they’re taking you to Mr Neil, the kindly dentist with his rubber probing fingers, tomorrow. (Because in his room with the local radio station churning out more adverts than music, you will always be the three year old curly tops cooed over by assistants in pale blue dresses and sensible pumps.)