He felt aggrieved about that. Wasn’t she even slightly concerned by his absence? He thought forlornly that she could at least come to his back gate and call over it, make sure that all was well with him. If you were truly friends with someone, you’d worry if they didn’t show up. Perhaps it was all a phoney act on her part, that big sister stuff. He glared across the alleyway, but nothing stirred beyond Angie’s open gate. There was a white dress on the clothesline there. It hung, motionless in the heat, as dry as timber, but no one came to fetch it in, and it was still there the next day.

Finally one morning, Thelma moved her shoulder cautiously and decided it was improved enough to return to work. Seymour pulled a secret face of relief. He didn’t think he could have borne one more day of her austere company.

As soon as she left he hurried across the alleyway and knocked on Angie’s door, but although it was ajar, she didn’t answer. He pushed it open and shook his head at the horrendous state everything was in. Angie’s attitude towards housework was always lackadaisical, but now it looked as though a storm had careered through the room, snatching things from their places and dumping them on top of other things already on the floor. Angie was asleep, lying fully dressed on top of the blankets, and while he automatically put the jug on to make coffee, she suddenly plunged into some alarming dream situation which made her thresh about and cry out.

Seymour patted her gently until she opened her eyes. ‘Hey, it’s okay, don’t be scared,’ he said. ‘It was only a bad dream. I get them like that sometimes.’

But Angie kept trembling, wrapping her arms around her as though to contain the shaking, and her face was a bewildered mask of smeared cosmetics. Mascara lay in caked black smudges across her cheeks. Seymour dampened a towel under the tap but she just looked at it blankly when he held it out. He dabbed clumsily at her face.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Now you’ll feel better. Have you got the flu back again, Angie? Well, I did warn you. If you don’t look after yourself properly, you can’t expect…’

That’s if she ever did have it in the first place…The thought rolled about in his mind, heavy as marble.

To his embarrassment, she burst into tears, groping for tissues in a box that proved to be empty and flinging the box across the room at a wall. He stood by helplessly until she stopped crying, just as abruptly as she’d begun. She sniffed once or twice like a child and dug her knuckles into her eyes, then she lit a cigarette.