Peggy shuffled forward on the chair and a wooden leg beneath her groaned. ‘Doctor, the Wrights are moving in next door to us – you know, Frank the Skank, the policeman even the other policemen don’t like – can you imagine?’ She almost shrieked the words. As she said it out loud, she could barely believe the nightmare she was living. She had told no one she couldn’t pay the rent and had no idea how she had got into this mess, had gone weak with relief when Kathleen had said to her, ‘Fancy missing the rent man last night, Peggy. If you had paid it then, you wouldn’t have had to go down those steps.’

Peggy could not have been more grateful for Kathleen’s mistake; all she had left was her dignity and to that she would cling like a drowning woman.

Now she said, ‘I was wondering, doctor, if you could write a letter to the dock board and get it stopped, them moving in, on account of my nerves? They might listen to you. You could write that them moving in will make me very sick, that I might die, or something.’

She knew she should tell him they were being evicted in a week’s time and if that happened, nothing mattered anyway. But if she said it out loud, it would make it real and it would definitely happen; if she just kept it quiet, maybe she could sort something out in the time remaining. Maybe Maura would send her a postal order. Maybe she could pawn enough to hold them off… Her voice had trailed off and she knew the answer before Dr Cole spoke, so she lunged straight into the remainder of her woes in an attempt to persuade and deflect him.

‘And if all that wasn’t enough going on, it’s my husband, Paddy. He’s a lazy git; he won’t go to work and so he hasn’t had a full week in six months and we’ve got no money. He won’t get out of bed, we’ve got no food in and I can’t go to the priest again. You must know about Paddy; he says he’s coming down here every week and you are waiting for him to be under a doctor at the hospital, a specialist, and it’s all taking so long…’

Peggy reached a tearful crescendo and Kathleen pushed a handkerchief between her fingers.

‘How are you keeping up with the rent, Peggy?’ she asked.

‘I’m managing,’ said Peggy as she dabbed at her eyes.