When I was a child, my dad used to tell a funny story about my brother falling out of a window. Louis was five at the time, and they were at my grandmother’s flat in the north of England. It was an ex-council housing complex, the ceilings were mean and low, but it was the second floor nonetheless. Dad had been helping my grandmother unload shopping in the kitchen. He left Louis playing in the sitting room, and a couple of minutes later noticed that the flat was uncharacteristically quiet. Pacing down the corridor, he found the room empty and the window wide open. Louis was lying motionless on top of a car below, limbs sprawled, a hefty dent in the roof…

Read the full story in The London Magazine. Available online here and in the December/January issue, which you can order here.