‘Told you that already, and don’t nag, my head can’t stand it…’ Angie snapped. ‘My metabolism. I’m giving the hospital a miss this morning. No point. I don’t think I’ve quite got the hang of today, yet. Thanks for the coffee, anyway.’ Her hands shook, splashing coffee and ash on to the blanket, and Seymour dabbed ineffectually with a tissue from the bedside table.

‘Sit down,’ Angie said irritably. ‘Don’t be darting about like Sadie the cleaning lady. You’ll end up a fuddy-duddy old bachelor before you even reach your teens if you don’t watch out.’

The chair was piled with clothes, so he perched awkwardly on the end of the bed, feeling depressed because the day wasn’t turning out as he’d planned. He’d been looking forward to choosing earrings to match whatever she planned to wear, hadn’t even minded about the lengthy trip to the hospital, for after that was over they could have gone somewhere else and spent a cheerful, bright afternoon.

Angie certainly didn’t look cheerful now, and he thought of the quarrel she’d had with her mother, all those things he’d overheard and didn’t understand, or only half understood. They fluttered softly about in his mind like bats in a cave, but suddenly alarmed, not wanting to know, he pushed those thoughts into a separate compartment and slammed the shutters down. Angie smiled at him over the coffee, a wan shadow of her usual joyful smile, but his spirits lifted a little.

‘So, where’d you get to yesterday, Buster?’ she said moodily. ‘Standing me up, eh? I could have taken you to the zoo, you know. There’s this cute orang-outang there. He’s got this old chaff-bag like a security blanket and he just sits with it over his head, like he’s got it lined with rude postcards or he can’t bear the sight of the world. He kills me, that orang-outang. Only you didn’t show up…’

‘But I told you I couldn’t drop in over the weekend, Angie, don’t you remember? It was when we were coming back from your mum’s, that’s when I told you. I had to go into town for school things.’

‘Oh, well, maybe you did tell me, my mind’s like a colander. I had a sort of busy weekend myself, anyway. Ran into some mates I hadn’t seen for ages. We went…went…’ Angie wrinkled her forehead, shook her head as though it were too much of an effort to remember and slid down with her arms folded behind her tousled head. She stared through the tiny window at the patch of cornflower sky, and seemed to forget that he was there. Her face emptied of everything else except melancholy.