DAY 16

If you’re annoyed about black people in the Sainsbury’s advert, you may be upset to learn that Christmas is a celebration of the birth of a Middle Eastern man.

That might be the best response Dahlia has seen so far. The one about Aldi’s family of carrots being relatable was funny, until she stopped to think about the fact that when it comes to the mindset of those outraged, it carries a little too much truth.

Stevie gently dances around directly asking Lora what’s wrong. He can sense it. She’s been flitting from task to task in various rooms in the house. She wants to give it a couple more days to see if her new problem goes away. It started mid-morning when Sean Bean spoke to her from the TV. For a confusing few moments after the scream, her brain could not process the fact that it was merely his voice, over an O2 mobile phone network advertisement, not the Sheffield bastard himself, inexplicably standing in her living room.

Just after lunch, halfway through an online guided meditation, Lora jumped and scrambled on all fours across the bedroom floor when she thought a woman she did not know was in the house talking about staying in control and releasing grey matter.

As afternoon wore on, she muted all devices and unplugged the TV and radio, terrified by the sheer range of threats to a person who loses the ability to differentiate between which voices are emanating from them, or from the inside of her lockdown sanctuary.

In the evening, with Stevie reading some work papers, she finally slumps into the chair and disregards the whole thing as a side-effect of fatigue. All is well until a flowing and optimistic phone call to her mother takes a terrifying plunge when Lora becomes convinced that a menacing southern man has entered the front room behind her beloved, surviving parent. She starts to shout and pull at her hair, dropping the phone and jumping up and down in a hysterical panic. Steve’s sheets flutter every which way as he leaps to his feet and grabs his fiancé around the shoulders. She stops dead and the blank look on her face convinces Stevie she has entered some sort of fugue state. Slowly, she reaches down and picks up the phone.

“Mum, are you still there? Are you OK?” her voice is trembling. Steve hears the tinny voice of his mother-in-law to be coming from the receiver. On their TV screen, a muted Danny Dyer dramatizes the events of TV game show, The Wall with serious expressions and hard-man body language. Her mother has the show on in the living room and is safe, behind her locked doors. Lora now realises this is not normal and must call the doctor 1st thing in the morning or face a silent existence with no radio, TV or internet sound. On a different day, it could have been Rolf Harris.