Eileen looked up. The stone along the roof of the building had a row of vertical recesses carved into it, the recesses filled with scraps of blond, stale-looking snow.

‘What you don’t know,’ Murt said. ‘It’s only when you stop to take stock you realise. I can, for instance, be reading a book.’

‘And you look up,’ Eileen said.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Like, what was I just reading? I can spend thirty minutes devoutly banging through a book, rereading sentences just to savour them. And a minute later I’m consulting the wall and I can’t recall a blessed.’

‘I get that, completely,’ Eileen said.

‘I mean, my concentration is absolutely totalled most of the time anyway, just gone. But now and then I’ll lull myself into thinking, yeah, yeah, the head’s getting sharp ­again—­Oh, go,’ he said, meaning the light.

Eileen looked. Green.

Murt’s bag was squeezed in front of his shins in the footwell. He mumbled at her that his phone was dead. Eileen said there was a portable charger in the glovebox.

‘Resurrecting the profiles,’ he said, thumbing at the screen.

At McDonald’s, Murt ordered two Happy Meals for himself, a chocolate milkshake and a coffee. They took a booth.

‘Always enjoy the tension,’ he said. ‘Waiting to see if they’ll ask if there’s actually a child with you.’

Eileen thought Murt’s mentioning a child might prompt him to ask after her son, Ashleigh.

‘I’m thinking they’re obliged to give you whatever you want in any case,’ she said.

‘Yeah, but there are the rules and there’s the spirit of the thing,’ Murt said, turning the nubbin of a chicken nugget between his fingers. ‘Strikes me I’ve been pining for a taste of exactly this. And you knew.’

‘I wanted to come anyway,’ Eileen said.

‘Look,’ he said. There were two lads at the counter. One was in a Chicago Bulls bomber jacket, the other had a frayed cast on his wrist and a round, ugly, floridly freckled face, their heads cocked back with their mouths open, contemplating the overhead screens of the menu.

‘The Heads,’ Murt said. ‘The Heads, the Heads, the Heads.’

Lunchtimes back in secondary school, he and Eileen would walk around the town pegging cold chips at pigeons and inventing classifications for ­passers-­by. The Heads was what they used to call a certain type of local, the ones to whom it would never occur to leave. Eileen, it seemed, had become one of them after all.