She intends to take out the wedding album and lay it on the bed and open it. Perhaps that will help her sleep. But halfway up the stairs she remembers that she has left the black leather album in the drawing room. Isn’t that what she was doing? She was looking at photographs. So she turns on the stairs and begins the descent again.

But not more than a step or two before she halts. She’s trying to remember something. What?

Oh yes. She remembers. It’s the other one, isn’t it? It’s the other album.

The one downstairs is the leather one; not the white photo album. It’s not the wedding one. No. The wedding one is still in the bedroom. At the back of the wardrobe. So she wheels around again. Faces up. Ascends. Christ it’s not easy when you’re old. Bad enough going up or down once. But now she is up and down like a yo-yo, because she forgets things. That is not good. Not good at all.

Anyway, here she is now in the bedroom. Yes. But did she plug out the heater? That’s another question. Maybe she did. At least she pretends she did.

And here, in the bedroom, in the wardrobe, it finally comes out.

Now look at that! Such a treasure! Folded in soft tissue paper and sitting at the bottom of a cardboard box that contained the fairy lights the Vet bought for their first Christmas, half a century ago. Yes. Here is the best album, full of all her most important memories, waiting for her arthritic fingers to touch.

Gussie had a frightened look as a child. His tie hanging loose. The sides of his shirt sticking out. An uncertainty in the expression. As if the camera was penetrating him.

As a boy he dreaded walking down the street of his hometown where he would be interrogated by pensioners who would pull his ears for no reason at all. There was a madman on a walking stick who travelled the town by feeling the walls. And a blind man behind sunglasses at the door of the public house. There was a fat man who sat on a kitchen chair on the pavement outside the door, a blanket over his knees, his pipe and glasses resting on the local newspaper at his feet, as he closed his eyes and stretched his face to the fitful bursts of the sun on a cloudy day in June. Always pretending he was asleep.

‘And who are you?’

‘Gussie.’

‘Ah! You’re a child of Birdie Waters.’

‘That’s right.’

The old man rubbed his callused hand across the child’s hair, as if he was combing it. As if he was searching the soft flesh of a lamb before plunging in the knife. But let’s not dwell on that. No. Not now.

For now she turns the page and opens the book of her wedding day.

And she can see him. Alex. The very first photo. With the cigarette in the side of his mouth and that smirk on his face. That Fred Astaire pose against the side of the car. Oh Christ, he could be handsome when he wanted to.