‘I won’t be able to sleep,’ said Anouk, turning her head from Nora’s hand.

‘It’s been a lazy day.’

‘It’s not even eight yet.’ The whine.

‘That voice,’ said Nora. ‘You could clear a room with it.’

‘You mean shatter glass with it.’

‘Eh?’

‘That’s what you usually say. You could shatter glass with that voice.’

Nora kissed her forehead, made no move to get up from the bed. Garlic and ground beef frying in a pan. The smell and sizzle of this reached Anouk’s bedroom from downstairs. Red, cooking a meal. Unaware of this night. Outside the window, the sky was lofty and purple, turbulent like the underwater view of a breaking wave. The snow had stopped falling but the weather report warned of more to come, some time after midnight.

‘Why aren’t you going, Mom?’

‘I’m going.’

When Red slammed the kitchen door on his way out, the clock slid down the wall to the floor and see-sawed for a moment on its lower rim, before tipping face down to totter and settle like a coin. The kitchen was charged with the cold air of his leaving. A moment later, across the yard, the shed window snapped yellow light and she knew at least he wasn’t planning to wander in the snow all night. There was an electric floor heater in there, a couch. The heater was a hazard and the shed a tinder box, but.

She went to the small room off the side of the kitchen and pulled open the door of the hot and ticking dryer, loaded her arms with still-warm clothes, the milky smell of hot cotton. She carried this load into the living room and dumped it on the couch, the clothes a tangled mass of vacant feet and arms and legs. Solace in the repetition of the mundane, of everyday jobs: snapping socks, squaring shoulder seams, aligning the legs of pants.

She had said to him that she did it because she was lonely. But that wasn’t true. She wasn’t even a little bit lonely. Given the chance, she would have been more alone.

She paired socks together, their thready guts exposed, into ugly little balls, and laid the stray singles over the arm of the couch. She got down on her knees and pushed her face into the neatly folded clothes, warm and maternal. At least something was.

Red was not a heavy type of man but as soon as he came back into the house, some hours later, boots shucked off, coat dropped to the floor, the volume of the house halved. Nora had moved from the floor to the couch, not able to sleep, had swept the folded clothes on to the carpet. Red came in and sat down on the floor, his back against the armchair.

‘In the movies the first thing people say is, how long has this been going on?’ he said.

‘Eh?’

‘I don’t know how, I . . . I’m embarrassed for you.’

She nodded.