‘Well.’ Lee rubbed his eyes. If Jean wasn’t going to eat the toast he wouldn’t mind having a bit of it himself, but it didn’t seem like the right thing to bring up. His hands went to his trouser pockets to check for the phone, but it wasn’t there. After a few moments he accepted he wasn’t wearing his trousers; he was still in his pyjamas. All this was a strange business, it really was. ‘The thing is, love, I don’t think I’ve got any credit.’ There was no don’t think about it. Lee never bought more than ten pounds of credit at a time, and the latest chunk had run out last night during the Pink Floyd documentary. He’d texted his brother about it – taking himself down to 15p – and then, when his brother asked if it was any good, Lee had maxed himself out writing: aye. Of course, if he’d known what was going to happen, he would have saved that last 15p, but anyone could be Mystic Meg after the event, couldn’t they?

‘How do you get more?’

‘We could top up online,’ said Lee, and their eyes met doubtfully. The connection was in and out, because of Jean’s reluctance to ring someone up and have conversations about the router and this password and that password. On Thursday they’d tried to get the internet going, to check film times, and ended up having to call the cinema. The girl who’d answered the phone sounded amazed, even euphoric, like she hadn’t had a conversation in weeks. Lee scratched his head again, and his temples, and the nape of his neck. ‘Head-scratcher’, applied to a problem, was not just a figure of speech to Lee; he didn’t know how anyone solved anything without doing that. His father had scratched his own head over the closing of the coal-mines, and his father over his own loss of faith in God and the need to conceal it for thirty years since he was a parish priest. Sure enough, the scratch dug out a useful thought.

‘Or, I tell you what. You can top up at the cash machine. By the Tesco’s. I could run out, get some … some credit on it.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Jean. ‘I mean, if you were sure, you could – perhaps you could pick up a few things.’ The Tesco had recently gone 24-hour. She started to give Lee a list of things they could do with. More milk, kitchen roll. But was he sure he would be all right? Going out there in the dark?

‘Of course,’ said Lee, ‘don’t be silly.’