‘As in, cremated?’

‘It’s short for Ernest.’

‘Well, that’s what people should call you then, isn’t it?’ she said bluntly.

‘You’d get along with my mother.’ I sidestepped a room-service tray with a crime scene of two crumpled energy drink cans and a chocolate bar wrapper on it. ‘She also finds me tiresome.’

She stopped at a door without a number – so, not a guest room, I deduced – at the end of the corridor and slid a key into the lock. She turned back to me before she opened it. ‘I know you’re anxious to see your brother. This’ll be quick.’ I noticed that her lips were wind-chapped in the way mountaineer’s lips often are, peeling and crevassed, like you could stick an ice-pick in and climb them. ‘Oh, I’m Juliette, by the way.’ Finally, an introduction. My editor has just breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I helped you fix your chains.’

She said it like it was new information, so I said, ‘I remember,’ to correct her but it came out throatier than I intended. In retrospect, more than a little lecherous. She examined me for a second longer.

‘Clearly I’ve made an impression. You’ve already invited me to meet your mother. And stop staring at my lips.’

I didn’t tell her I was thinking of peeling them, not kissing them, but either way, I felt myself blush.

She opened the door, revealing a cluttered office with two desks nudged up against one another in the centre. The filing system could only be labelled as cyclonic; mountains and valleys of paper covered the floor. The walls were ringed with bookshelves, which at least had papers filed into bright orange binders, but those binders, the small semblance of organisation, were stacked horizontally. I thought it was a bit rich for someone who didn’t know how to stack a bookshelf to judge my vehicular ineptitude, but I let it slide because I was still chastened from being called out on the lips thing. In the middle of each desk was a blocky computer you could do weights with, wired to keyboards that were the pasty, discoloured white usually reserved for outdated plastic computer accessories or teenagers’ bedsheets.

Juliette took a seat on a black leather chair and started clacking the stiff keys with one hand, beckoning me over with the other.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked, half to know more about her and half to discover which century her computer was from.