I could imagine that talk. I said I’d think about it but at present I was staying with friends “in north London.” I was all right. They must remember I was twenty years old. It was a measure of my youth that I said “nearly twenty-and-a-half years old.”

“There isn’t anything you’re not telling us, is there, dear?”

Plenty, but not the things you mean, Mother, not pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease or trouble with crack and smack or even climbing a pylon. It was that phone call and what they said, or didn’t say, that made me decide to get a job. Not to think about it, not to do it next week or even tomorrow but now.

Silver’s daily paper was on the table in the living room but I dismissed consulting its Situations Vacant columns. More out-of-date pictures of Andrew Lane and Alison Barrie on its front page had put me off that paper, these and the story it carried of the couple and Jason being seen by a “member of the government” while campaigning for a forthcoming by-election in north Wales. I thought a bit about this and what it was that caused otherwise intelligent people to make these misidentifications, apparently want to make them and go on making them all the time. I wondered again if we could be mistaken and how we could put this to the test. Then I went out to look for a job.

Although I wasn’t paranoid about this sort of thing the way Liv was, I steered clear of any possible sighting by Max and Selina by always walking in the direction of Torrington Gardens. Apart from Max going for his runs, they never went anywhere on foot, so there was little chance of an encounter. I was thinking more about the fire damage than about them. On my way to the newsagent I had a look at the houses where the fire had been. Because of the damage to the roofs of Nos. 22 and 24 our route to the end of the terrace had been cut off for several days, but now I saw that the tarpaulins and battens Silver had forecast would soon go up there were in place. Men were working on the roof, not to begin repairing it but to protect what lay below from rain and wind damage. A scaffolding had been put up. It looked temporary to me. It would come down once the roof area was made watertight.