She closes her eyes and lifts up her head in the shower, washing the grime of the sheets, and the coach and the plane and the airport and the coach and the sand and the suntan oil off her.

After lunch they unpack their cases and take the washing down to the laundrette and, while they’re there, ask about dry-cleaning prices. They pick up juice, milk, bread, a chicken and vegetables. They spend the afternoon sorting through a carrier bag of cards, reading out messages to each other, pulling out money and vouchers and laying them in separate piles on the carpet. Caz notes down on a pad of paper who gave what.

They go to the bank and pay in all the money bar a few notes, into Caz’s account. They pay the invoices that have arrived while they’ve been away.

The presents are still heaped in the middle of the floor, silver and white and blue. Caz hoovers around them.

They cook a nice dinner of chicken and vegetables, carry it through to the studio room, turn the lights on and sit down on the sofa to eat it. He opens one of the bottles of wine left over from the wedding.

As soon as they put the first forkful to their mouths there’s a tap from behind the gas fire. Tap, tap, tap. A pause. They listen. Then more insistently, assertively: TAP, TAP, TAP.

He puts down his fork. ‘It’s almost as if it knows we’re here.’

Tap, tap, tap.

She is silent. She realizes, and maybe he does too, that it does know they are there. That from its dark prison it can see the chinks of electric light through the joins in the boarded-up fireplace, and through the gaps where the fire’s plumbed in. That it can see an escape route. That it can hear them talking.

He says, ‘I wonder how long it’s been there.’

‘It could have been there for days.’

‘How long can they live like that?’

‘How should I know?’

She pushes her food around and leaves most of it – a waste of a good chicken. Later, after washing up, they sit in the tiny kitchen to finish their wine, but the carcass in the lidless bin and the bones on the plates remind Caz of the pigeon.

They sit up late in the kitchen. When they go to bed the room’s quiet but Caz wakes in the night and hears scrabbling. It’s quieter though, and then it stops. She strains her ears to hear: there is nothing. She wonders if that’s it. And then it starts again. She blocks up her ears with the pillow. She thinks she can hear it through the feathers of the pillow.

The next day after a late brunch they decide to open the presents. There are bewilderingly many. They take turns.