When Claire opens the door she looks different, as if she might have reached the low point of her descent and be climbing back up. There are traces of colour in her cheeks, though her hair is still careless, swept back in a corner-chemist clip. She invites Naylor in. On the hall floor, there’s a black bin bag, stuffed to capacity.

‘Evan’s old clothes,’ says Claire. ‘I kept them all, and now they’re too small. Time to throw them out.’

Overhead, a floorboard creaks. A door closes, and a bolt rattles home.

Claire looks at Naylor, shrugs and leads the way to the kitchen, where the air’s thick with oven chips and vinegar and warm sausage-fat from a pan on the stove. She offers Naylor a seat at the table, which is covered in clutter – a laptop, unopened mail, keys, a couple of DVDs – but the place overall seems tidier, cleaner. In recovery.

‘I bought him a few bits to be going on with, but it’s difficult,’ says Claire. ‘He’s lost touch with everything, what’s in and what’s out, doesn’t know what his friends are wearing.’ She’s filling the kettle at the tap. ‘Listen to me, talking about his friends. I don’t think he’ll have many of those. I expect we’ll move now, have a fresh start. No bad thing, I suppose. Matt wanted to move anyway. We’re notorious around here, and he hates that, being whispered about, but I always resisted.’

She switches on the kettle and takes two white mugs from the cupboard. Naylor has white mugs at home, but hers were ordered from a cheap catalogue, a job lot of crockery, four place settings, when she moved into the new flat. Claire’s look like porcelain, an elegant design pleasing to the eye; they’ve got Habitat or John Lewis written all over them.

‘Earl Grey or English Breakfast?’

‘Builder’s,’ says Naylor. ‘Milk and one, please.’

A black cat is walking down the back garden path. The view from the kitchen window is of other people’s gardens, and of other houses. Claire opens the fridge to find the milk, and the fridge looks full, of vegetables and yogurt and cartons of juice.

‘I had this thing,’ Claire goes on, pouring milk, spooning sugar, ‘that he might come home. That he might turn up here one day, and wouldn’t find us. Wouldn’t that have been too awful? Now I wish we had moved, so he didn’t have to come back here, to being a curiosity. I don’t blame him for not wanting to go out.’

‘Doesn’t he want to go out?’

Claire shakes her head and places Naylor’s tea in front of her, still whirling from being stirred.