She perches on the edge of his sagging three-seater, a mug in both hands, focused somewhere behind him. Geoff sits opposite at his desk, misted by his own steaming mug of tea. When he asks how she’d come to be ejected from the city she speaks, her voice tinged with a Spanish accent. A CEO husband heading one of the big five housing associations, a six-bedroomed relative palace in Golders Green. A near-perfect son about to begin secondary education at a leading private school. She could have remained a housewife and claimed her husband’s income on the census, but she’d started her own cleaning business, as that’s what she did when they met, and she was proud not to rely on him. Little did she know when the vote was taken there’d be two strikes against her, one for her country of origin, another for her lack of personal wealth. She’d been blacklisted without anyone’s knowledge until the declaration of section one eight two. The night before last, the government implemented that order.

They’re silent when she’s finished. Now she’s told him who she really is, the difference between them is startling. Her thin, sitting upright and taut with the muscle that comes from hard work, him podgy, slumped in his office chair. Her thick with an accent that makes her speaking voice difficult to decipher, him concise, well-thought-out and clear. He finds it tough to imagine her wandering a six-room mansion, or dropping the son off at school, hurrying him through the gates. She doesn’t look the type, more like an immigrant fallen on hard times in a drug dealer’s jacket. It seems odd that even with all Geoff’s upbringing and education he should end up here, in this flat, and she there. The difference produces an acid burn in his stomach he can’t entirely put down to not having eaten since breakfast, or the tea.

‘What do you do? Is that your work?’ she says, indicating the laptop.

‘I’m a journalist, actually. For the local rag. Only I haven’t written for them in a while.’

The truth was they’d let him go. Budget cuts, they said. He’d been living on meagre funds borrowed from his parents for the last nine months. Stubborn, not wanting to leave. And now this.

But of course he can’t say that. Scraps of truth lodge between his teeth. He clenches his jaw.

‘I have an army friend down there; you might’ve seen her,’ he tells the woman. ‘She can get passes. She’ll be here at eleven.’

The woman shifts, uncomfortable. Her face is drawn with lines beneath the bare light.

‘And you’d give me one?’

‘Of course.’ He stretches his lips in another toothless smile. ‘Why else are you here?’

Her eyes are opaque. She’s trying to keep them open, obviously struggling.

‘Thank you. Thank you …’