‘He sees things, you know? You’re the only one who wants to be living here. I’m stuck because I’m stymied by fucking Leonie—who won’t come near the place, by the way, she’s scared the floor’s about to cave in. Lou’s here until she gets her life back on track. And our son spends most of his time camping in that men’s toilet downstairs. Do you think it’s healthy for him to be sleeping in a bunk room with you and Lou, and me a wall away?’

‘I know it didn’t come about the way I wanted, but I’ve always wanted to live here. Why should I be the one to leave?’

Kelly smiled in irritation. She could always rely on Gordon to dodge the subject and focus on this bloody house. Seeing the bright side for some men wasn’t optimism; it was cowardice.

‘Yeah, living in The Lodge, dream come true.’ She waited for her annoyance to subside. Their son wasn’t dealing Vyvanse. Small mercies. ‘Ben only wants you to be happy. You should be the one to leave because you’re the one who can.’

‘Who says I’m not happy here?’

Kelly moved to the saloon door and watched the jigsaw players, who could have been something particularly dire from Cézanne. She knew how to tag an emotion with a great painter’s name—Merci beaucoup, Workers’ Education Association night courses! She had to look outwards at this stage of life, and the art appreciation classes she’d taken up distracted her commentary from, in this instance, ‘Look at those fuckwits stuck in their rut’ to ‘Aha, Cézanne, something like The Absinthe-Drinking Jigsaw-Playing Desperates’. Art appreciation made her feel not only sophisticated but transgressive. She would soon move on to abstract expressionism, and those people, those blobs of paint, would be stuck here forever. Although, or perhaps because, she had grown up in Bluebird as the only daughter of the village chieftain, Kelly had always thought of Bluebirders as ‘those people’. They’d always suspected that she looked down on them, but they didn’t know why, as they couldn’t tell the difference between entitlement and entrapment.

‘Have you been seeing that new hairdresser?’ Josie squawked up the slope of the floor at Kelly, who self-consciously touched the back of her head, undercut two days earlier. Red Cap and Tonsure Man were ignoring her because they had no interest. Dog was ignoring her because he had too much. She reckoned.

‘Which one?’ Kelly asked unenthusiastically, trying to recall if any of her recent Tinder dates had been a barber.

Josie was giving her a look that was either fed up or startled. It was hard to tell with Josie, her affect was so mixed up since her brain surgeries. Kelly thought: A face straight from Van Gogh, equally confused and confusing, a handful of pieces missing.