Ant. I want to hide under the nearest duvet because I’ve let him down too. After I paid for Zoë’s abortion, and she slipped away from Brighton like a ghost, I stopped turning up for cafe shifts. Again. Loyalty took second place to wallowing in my own self-loathing.

‘Leave me.’

I’ve no strength, thanks to what I smoked after Kerry left. He slots his hands into my sweaty armpits to haul me up and a sudden jolt brings me upright. I think he had been expecting me to weigh so much more.

‘Ugh, Banana Man, your clothes really stink.’

I laugh in his face.

He recoils. ‘And you need some Tic-Tacs. Your breath could spontaneously ignite, it’s pure alcohol.’

‘Just mouthwash.’

‘Is any of this your stuff?’ he asks, casting a disgusted look at the blankets and carrier bags that surround me.

I gesture at my big coat with all its pockets. ‘Most of what’s mine is in here.’ There’s a rucksack too, but I don’t plan to be alive by the time the weather turns cold enough to need the sleeping bag or army boots again.

He helps me towards the front door and out into the blinding day.

I groan.

‘Are you hurt?’ Ant asks.

‘No, the sunshine—’

A Fiesta is parked outside the squat with its passenger door open, and it reminds me of something. Someone.

Kerry sits in the driver’s seat of her mother’s car, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. The passenger seat has been covered in a bin-bag, and the footwell too. It’s like they’re trying to get rid of a body.

I laugh.

When Kerry sees us, she gets out of the car and moves towards me. She doesn’t say a word but the two of them manoeuvre me into the passenger side and then pull the seatbelt across.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Somewhere safe,’ Ant says.

Somewhere safe turns out to be the second bedroom above the cafe. I don’t know how Kerry’s persuaded Ant to let me stay here, but it’s this or the streets as no B & B would let me within five hundred metres without full decontamination.

This used to be Ant’s bedroom before his parents went back to Spain and he took over the Arsehole. The single mattress has been covered in a thick rubber fitted sheet and layers of fleece blankets, and they’ve covered the Smurfs roller blind with a black bin bag to cut out all the light. The other furniture’s gone, though they’ve left his New Kids on the Block posters. There’s a plastic bucket, a row of mineral water bottles, and a stack of old towels on the floor, plus a clock and a radio on a high shelf that I can’t reach.

And there’s a bolt on the outside of the door.

I’m afraid.