I wanted to ask him about David so badly I almost took him up on it, but he made a mistake. He put his hand on my waist. Picking up his fingers, I bent the index finger back till he yelped and snatched his hand away. I pushed past.

“Well, you’re no fun, are you?” he called after me.

It was getting colder but still I went out, not every evening, but some of them.

The phone rang.

“Hello?” I said. I wanted him to know it was me, but there was no answering voice, not even the sound of breathing, as though the caller at the other end had covered the mouthpiece with their hand.

One night it rang and rang. Each time it was the same.

“Hello? Hello?” I listened into the waiting silence, heard the receiver being placed back gently in its cradle. Only once the sound of a ragged breath, as though drawn by someone breaking the surface of the sea.

“Is it you? David, I—”

Then the dial tone, and then nothing.

The next morning the air tasted bitter with burning. The verge was soaked in dew. It seeped through my shoes, which left silky green footprints among the silvered grass. The glass in the door of the red phone box had cracked and blackened. I opened it. From inside, you could see that the roof was half-gone. The receiver lay among blackened coils on the floor, the unit was half torn off the wall, and everywhere the stink of petrol, the acrid smell of burning, but the fire long out. Water dripped down the ruined walls. A black puddle was forming.

Could have been vandals. Locally, there was hardly a bus shelter, a phone box, a parking meter left untouched. But I had my suspicions. Peter. Or Marcus. Or Peter. I kept them to myself where they smoldered in my chest, a damp, toxic fire giving off choking billows of smoke, still holding my peace when, at the end of the month, we waved him off to Oxford.

I might have spoken them to Em, but my mother died. On October 18, four months after she predicted the end of the world, she fell again, this time in front of a car.

It was a Friday. I took the call at Darren’s office. What had she done now? There had been an accident. Yes, I would come.

Darren looked up from his desk. He was wearing reading glasses, crappy ones he bought for a couple of quid in Boots because he couldn’t stand the idea of an eye test, being loomed over by someone in a white coat.

“Mum’s been hit by a car.”