My mum loves to do the bolt. For her it’s a game until it turns too real. It starts as a playful hop and a jog past some houses. She exhales with a smile then and her eyes expand so much that her brow lines fold. And then she is gone. And then she is bolting down a footpath with her house keys in between her knuckles like jagged bronze knives.

The first time it happened I was in year five and she was walking me to school in the morning. The soles of my original three-stripe shoes scraped on the ground. She turned around to see me squatting on a low brick fence like a gargoyle. Her cheeks fell still, her mouth dropped, she turned around and started running. I thought it was a game so I started following, sometimes running, sometimes skipping until she started screaming ‘Boithia! Boithia! Vrykolokas!’ I caught up to her a few houses away from my school because she’d tired out by then. I calmed her down and after that never asked her to take me to school again.