#goodnightlavinia

"You’ll have to sleep in here with me, Lavinia.” She strips off in silence and climbs in.

They can hear talking outside, and then the inevitable tap on the door. Lavinia sucks up the tension in one elongated in-breath and expels as much fear as she can.

"We make sacrifices every day, Father…every day and every night, so our children may live."

Lavinia lights a candle stub melded into the neck of an empty brown-stained rum bottle, sweeps away the sprigs, the leaf cuttings and the rock salt from a grainy wooden slab of a table

She turns her attention to the window as the tracks split off and the overhead cables dip up and down. Then through the Gasworks and Copenhagen tunnels with the graffiti scrawls like scent markings. Past

All is not well in the house of Zahid, and on a bitter winter’s morning in 2006, Shaheera quits the family home in London via a downstairs window after the police fail to take her domestic troubles seriously.