That was at eleven p.m. When they awoke the next morning, it was as if they’d never rowed. For a few days she’d scurried around, her industrious ant-like self, carrying George’s world on her back. Then the morning came when she wasn’t up before him. He woke to find her curled up on the pillow next to him – she’d come back from the spare room – asleep with her small mouth open, smelling faintly of rot. The kettle hadn’t been about to boil. He couldn’t hear the clink of cups or the sound of the toaster popping, just his wife’s shallow breathing.

George had thought she might be going mad. First the dog, then the telling-off, now the sleeping in. What next? he’d wondered. Within a couple of days, he’d found out.

What came next was Ellen asking for an ambulance, collapsing before it arrived. She was barely coherent in the hospital. She looked blurry, like she did when George didn’t have his glasses on, except he did. She was bleeding round the edges, flooding his bleeding heart. He was pleased to be sent home with a ‘Nothing you can do here, best go home and rest.’

He knew he should have felt worried, but seeing her there, all floppy and flaccid, had scared him and so he had run away, his tail between his legs. Had been pleased to get home, where life felt normal, apart from the fucking dog, which he’d promptly locked in the laundry room with a bowl of water and some Bonio biscuits.

He’d got a taxi to see Ellen the next day, full of ire about the cost of it, and the bloody foreigner who’d driven him in a cab stinking of flowers. He’d been hungry and hadn’t found the shirt he wore on Tuesdays. He’d marched down dimly lit corridors that made his shoes squeak, looking forward to having a good old moan to his wife, but she’d been asleep when he arrived, and when she woke, she was full of morphine. Her eyes couldn’t focus, had lost all their blue. They’d already died, and the rest of her went later that afternoon.

It hadn’t been dramatic. No beeping machines or people rushing in. The room didn’t seem emptier once her heart had stopped beating. Her soul didn’t rise from her body and ride on white wings through the ceiling. She was just alive, and then dead. Wires were removed and her body was wheeled away, pushed down the corridor by two orderlies discussing EastEnders, and George had been pushed out of the door with a plastic bag containing her clothes.