The car’s engine dropped to a steady growl, the growl of going nowhere. The windshield was an iridescent wash of reflected city light. I could not make out the ­driver – and even if I could all I would likely see would be a face in a mask, as my face was in a ­mask – but I could sense the mood burning off of them. Or I was thinking how I would feel, and how, in that moment, I actually did feel: my heart pounding with the furious relief of having avoided catastrophe by a hair’s breadth, and looking around ­wild-­eyed for someone to blame. Only I was the one to blame, my head all muddled up as I had stepped heedless and dreamy off the kerb, pulling Caber’s beloved dogs along with me.

The car continued to growl, stationary in the middle of the street.

I eased my grip on the leashes and Linus and Buddy barrelled across the road, dragging me after them.

The car moved off.

On the other side of the street, I could see that the coffee place was indeed open, albeit with the counter shunted up into the doorway like a barricade, a single masked employee inside, idly checking their phone in the empty, gloomy interior.

There was no one else around, no other cars in the street.

It was late May, the final days of a rainy, ­fog-­strewn spring, and though the harshest of the lockdown restrictions had eased, and people could leave their houses as much as they wanted, the city still felt as becalmed and tentative, as sullenly ghostly, as a new year’s morning, all the time.

What happened was my father had called. That’s what had my head all muddled up. Usually he rang blind drunk or from the hospital. This time it was the hospital. He tended to ring after the first few days of sedation and ­anti-­convulsion medicine had got him through the worst of the withdrawals and he was feeling not so bad, had been restored to a state of endurable badness.