We drive back into the familiar murk of Stoke-on-Trent. We stop at a light, at which I spend two minutes avoiding the stone eyes of an ugly bull dog gargoyle. Who buys these things? It is lambing season, and we’ve driven past tiny tiny frolicking lambs. Just past the RAC centre near Birmingham- a nearly-home landmark which reminds me every time of those twelve hour drives back from Germany, miserable sleety rain and jams, of service stations and salami butter potatobread sandwiches, of my father’s khaki thermos flask and that sick coffee-sweat-perfume smell, of falling asleep to Radio 4 and, inexplicably, Mr Blobby – we drive beneath a procession of sturdy black cows crossing a pedestrian bridge, sillhouettes against the rain-heavy sky. I fall asleep to Tracy Thorne.

 

Since I’ve been gone my mother has mastered skype and I have grown. She stands next to me with her new pixie haircut, and comes only just up to my shoulders.

 

A comes back last night. I am very drunk – we have been sitting on the field with a bottle of red from E’s family’s vineyard, which we drink out of brandy glasses, and someone has mother-made apple cake and taboulla in the kind of foil trays they give you when you order takeaways – so when I run into him coming up the stairs as I am stumbling down them, I don’t say anything. I am optimistic, he says this morning when I see him. I picture him at 3am the previous night, staring at the stars and wanting to die. I am also optimistic, crunching on icecubes and reading something other than Renaissance literature, and for a moment cannot imagine how I could have been anything other.