I have a tiny bit of luck left. I appear to have the place to myself. The pile of post indicates that neither Gemma nor Emma is home yet.

I gather up the envelopes, wincing when I see a couple of brown ones with my name on. No. Not today, not when the world is working for me, for once. I know I’m broke, the bank knows I’m broke, the Visa people know I’m broke. We’re locked in this endless, pointless détente: they write, they call, they say ‘we’ve noticed you don’t have any money and we’d like to know what you’re planning to do about that’. I say ‘Well, nothing, because I don’t have any money.’ It’s like a Beckett play about administration. I don’t understand how something so dull gives me so many nightmares.

Holding my breath, rolling up on the balls of my feet, I enter the kitchen as though I’m taking to the stage in Covent Garden wearing satin slippers, rather than taking to the floor in grubby Converse, hoping to steal some toast. Yes! I see bread. Thick, white, carb cushions, hope and heat and home. Will there be butter? Gemma has some sort of terrible flax spread, bought ostensibly because she has high cholesterol, but almost certainly because it tastes so revolting that even I won’t nick it. Emma alternates. Three weeks out of four she’s on the tiny tubs of coconut and hemp and things that cost fourteen pounds from Whole Foods. But if she’s had a bad date or a worse hangover, she hits the hard stuff—super salty Lurpak Spreadable. And here it is, emblazoned with her name, Sharpie’d in letters two inches high, bedecked with black, cartoon daisies, as if she’s some sweet-natured, giving hippy child, and not the sort of woman who would burst into your bedroom without knocking and accuse you of nicking a spray of her Carolina Herrera. (Firstly, I like to think of myself as a sort of Marxist Robin Hood, stealing only according to my needs, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. The poor is me. Secondly, I would never intentionally smell of anything that comes out of a bottle shaped like a high heeled shoe.)

I’m halfway through my first slice, standing up, butter sliding off my chin, onto my coat lapels, moaning like a Catholic martyr in the throes of an ecstatic vision, when I hear footsteps. Shit. Shit shit shit. Have I got time to run to my room and lock the door? I am frozen to the spot, my treacherous toes curled tight and rooting me to the ground. Somewhere, David Attenborough is gently warning an invisible audience that my survival skills are insufficient, and that they should prepare for bloodshed.