‘They are some size, actually,’ Anne said.

‘I know.’

‘Once you get up close. They’re the size of dogs.’

‘Descended from dinosaurs,’ Lorna said.

She remembered the sandwich in her pocket.

‘Probably, there’s a completely mundane explanation for what Lydia Healy was up to behind that desk,’ she said as she unwrapped the sandwich from the napkin and tore the remains into chunks. ‘Only we don’t know it.’

‘The world is full of unaccountable things, if you’re keeping track,’ Anne said.

‘And who keeps track?’ Lorna asked as she lobbed a bread chunk. The gulls began tearing at the morsel with violent enthusiasm.

‘Can they eat that?’ Anne asked. ‘The ham and the coleslaw and all that?’

‘They can eat anything, I think.’

Lorna tossed the rest of the sandwich. She and her mother watched the gulls until they were finished, then they turned and began to make their way back towards the Silver Coast.

ANHEDONIA, HERE I COME

Bobby Tallis possessed the drainpipe physique, ­knee-­length mackintosh, and balefully frail demeanour of a poet, or so he believed, as he pursued a lavishly wayward course across the mangy municipal parks, median strips and depressed residential quadrangles of his quarter of the city on another blustery October afternoon. One hand broodingly ensconced within a pocket, Bobby smoked as he walked and made rapid, furtive motions with his lips, as if in intense, collusive conversation with himself. Bobby was a poet.

He lived in a dilapidated apartment block on the ­south-­side inner city, a block so populated with retirees and pensioners that ­visitors – of which Bobby had absolutely ­none – often mistook it for a state retirement home. Bobby was certain he was the only resident under the age of sixty. The block’s ­corridors – the ­sour-­cream walls lit by ­low-­wattage sconces downy with dust; the furred, blue, perpetually damp carpeting in which ­shoe-­print impressions dolefully ­lingered – evoked for Bobby a budget version of the afterlife. It was, at least, a peaceful place, no noise but the ­late-­night dysphagic judders of the lift’s recurringly jammed doors.

Bobby walked six miles every day. He did so because a lengthy walk helped oxygenate the creative capacities as well as ­pre-­emptively dispel the oppressive sense of cabin fever that would consume him if he did not regularly remove himself from the tiny tomb of his ­one-­bedroom apartment. Also, there was a ­shopping-­centre car park three miles from his building where he bought weed from a schoolgirl on a ­near-­daily basis.