My daughter’s had a bad dream, and she’s crying out to me to come to her room and keep her safe. Her shrill voice is like a siren in the night. Wearily, checking the clock, I slip out of bed in my pyjamas and fumble my way through the dark to the corridor, and I’m already stepping through the doorway to her bedroom when I recall that I do not have a daughter, that I never had a daughter, that there is altogether too much I am at risk of passing on for me to consider having a daughter. And yet there she is