The crowd dispersed, leaving one man lurking under the eave of the shelter. He had a Slazenger sports bag bunched against his ribs, long wrists dangling from his coat cuffs, and a pink, animate nose, twitching like a dog’s. It was Murt’s gait and it was Murt’s head. Eileen had known Murt since they were both ­thirteen – a dozen years ­now – and his frame had never lost the stringy, unfinished quality of adolescence, though he had since acquired a little belly.

Eileen dropped the dead smoke and hauled her sleeping arm inside the car and on to her lap. She jabbed her other thumb into the crease of her palm. The flesh was cool, waxen, but already she could feel it coming on, the reviving fizz of the nerves. When the bristling subsided, she opened the door and got out, raised her refreshed arm into the air. Murt gathered the folds of his coat collar and set off from under the eaves.

When he was near enough, she said, ‘Welcome back to planet Earth.’

‘They still calling it that?’ he said.

‘They are.’

‘I told you, you didn’t have to come.’

‘I know,’ Eileen said.

He went to hug her, and she stepped away from the door to let him.

He asked her to go to his Uncle Nugent’s. He did not say if his uncle was expecting him, or what his mother would have to say about that. Murt did not make any mention of the mother. Eileen had resolved not to ask too many questions. As far as she knew, on this occasion Murt had entered the hospital voluntarily and the hospital had now consented to his discharge; Eileen took this to mean that he was over the worst of it, had managed to once again step back from the ledge of himself. It would be up to him to talk about it or not. So Eileen concentrated on getting him across town, subdued on a weekday afternoon, the slivers of ice pulverised into the pores of the macadam giving the road a sullen shine.

They idled on a red at a ­T-­junction.

‘Who won the US election?’ Murt asked.

She told him.

‘Whoa,’ he said flatly.

The election had been two weeks earlier. Eileen figured Murt already knew who’d won; the question was a way of letting her know how out of it he ­was – at least back then.

‘We could go to McDonald’s,’ Eileen said.

‘What even are they called?’ Murt said. Eileen glanced over at him. He had his shoulders ducked forward and was looking through the windshield at a building that used to be a bank, then something else, but was now a bank again.

‘What are what even called?’

‘I want to say cornices,’ he said. ‘Turrets, maybe. Those sculpted bits of stone, those patterned bits, at the very top. I don’t have a clue, but.’