It’s starting to spit with rain as they walk home.

It’s cold in the studio room, but they daren’t put the fire on. The room is quiet and still. Caz rubs her hands and turns the small lamp on. They lie on the floor by the fire even though it’s unlit.

She rolls a cigarette. She’s rolling up the cocktails by the pool of the last evening, in the stars on the beach of the last night, scooping in the stray crabs they saw scuttle across wet dark sand in the moonlight.

He’s watching her hands as she rolls, as she strikes a match that flares in the dark, the new gold ring that was his grandmother’s catching its light.

‘Can I have one?’ He reaches out and touches her hair with his fingertips.

She takes one more drag and blows out the smoke. ‘You can finish this one. I don’t want it.’

She lies on her back on the floor with her hands behind her head, looking up at the ceiling, seeing the starry sky.

And then there’s a thud and a rattling that makes her jump as the pigeon hurls itself against the back of the fireplace. And then the tapping begins again. Caz counts more than thirty taps. Maybe it was the smoke that roused it. They get up off the floor.

He says, ‘I suppose there’s nothing one can do?’

‘Short of ripping the fireplace out.’

‘Could we do that?’ He starts feeling along the glued joins of the board.

‘No. Just come to bed.’

The tapping stops once they turn the lamp out, but it’s soon replaced by scraping and flurrying that continues into the early hours – flurrying more and more frantic, and occasionally an echoing clang as the whole fireplace shakes. Perhaps it goes on all night. They fall asleep eventually from exhaustion, when it’s already starting to get light. She wakes a couple of hours later needing the loo and then lies awake for an hour or more looking at the wedding dress and suit still hanging up in their body bags on the wardrobe, and listening to the rain and the beating of wings.

On the third morning they’re up early, feeling groggy and sandy-eyed, and she makes a breakfast of toast and raspberry jam. He has to go to work in the afternoon. As soon as they sit on the sofa to eat, it starts: five taps, louder than ever and more insistent. It sounds like a hammer. She imagines its beak all smashed and bloody. She pushes away the toast and jam. He can’t eat either. The tapping goes on. It sounds as though it’s trying to chip its way out.

‘Let’s rip out the fireplace,’ she says.

‘Can we do that?’

‘I don’t know. Let’s give it a go.’

He looks pleased at this, hopeful.