‘Don’t you dare make excuses,’ Laura said.

‘Sorry.’

Through the kitchen windows the avuncular sun shone, creating golden parallelograms on the terracotta floor.

‘He always was’, Laura said, ‘a stupid fucking cunt.’

She sat at the table and cried. Richard leaned against the counter, thinking, I did this. I’m the reason she’s crying. He felt bad about this. He also felt affronted. He felt like saying, I’m the one in real fucking trouble here, Laura. Let’s focus on the real problem. But he said nothing.

He knew that getting Laura to address his problems sensibly would take time: maybe the whole day. Nonetheless, he felt a certain amount of urgency.

‘I need to know,’ Richard said, ‘what happened in the club.’

‘Nothing happened.’

‘Something happened. You walked out with him.’

‘I didn’t “walk out with him”, Richard. He, like, caught up with me. It was a crowd, like.’

‘We need to get our story straight, Laura.’

‘No, you need to get your story straight, Richard. Conor’s dead.’

‘I know that, Laura.’

‘This can’t be happening,’ Laura said. ‘This is the worst thing.’

‘It was an accident,’ Richard said for the first time. ‘We didn’t mean to do it.’

Laura sniffed and snuffled.

Richard said, ‘Where are your old pair?’

‘Playing tennis,’ Laura said. ‘Oh, fuck. I’ll have to tell them. Fuck.’ She looked up at him with leaking eyes. ‘Do your parents know?’

‘My mother knows Conor’s dead,’ Richard said. ‘My dad’s playing golf.’

‘Who saw it?’ Laura said.

‘The fight? I don’t know. Foxer says, like, twenty people.’

‘That was all our friends, Richard.’

‘It was dark,’ Richard said. ‘Christ, even I can’t remember what happened.’

They talked like this for the rest of the afternoon. They talked about what the funeral would be like. They talked about what they would say to the guards if it came to that. They agreed that they wouldn’t mention anything to their parents or their friends. They agreed that after today, they would try not to talk about Conor’s death at all.

Eventually they went up to Laura’s bedroom and lay on the unmade bed. Laura put on some music and turned the volume down. Later neither of them could remember what record she had chosen.

At around five in the afternoon they made love. Richard perceived that, from now on, the few seconds before orgasm would be the only respite he would ever get from thinking about Conor’s death. His consciousness was already so embattled, so wholly devoted to the labour of exculpation, that as he lay in Laura’s shaded room he recognized something new about his life, a new impossibility: the impossibility of ordinary thought.

Richard stayed in Laura’s until ten o’clock that night. After he had left – following a lengthy goodbye of tears and kisses – he stood on the street outside, holding the keys to his car and telling himself that everything would be okay. He could hear the echoing rattle of a ball kicked against the side of a house. The windows he could see were warmly lit, and everything was tranquil. But the sky was turning black, and as Richard walked to his car he could feel a rising wind, tousling his hair and causing the hairs in his forearms to bristle – with cold, with secret knowledge.