Across the darkness I leap on to the sofa before I see my boots, bundled in my coat, there in the middle of the floor. Somehow, I spin around and scoop them up, just as the door opens. I leap and in a blink I am behind the sofa. The voices – louder, still jolly – trail in. My eyes, adjusting to the darkness, are helped then by the light falling in from the opened door, but there’s nothing to see here, trapped behind leather.

‘Ha,’ I hear the woman say. ‘Like you would!’

The light clicks on. And everything is bright.

4

Tuesday

I left my life to be alone. When I think of it, phrased in that way, I feel like an idiot. To be alone. The idea that I once thought I could find solitude on the streets! When the drunks don’t piss on you and the police don’t move you on and the people don’t look through you in that way, there’s still the sky. For you the sky is freedom. It’s your endless, unconfined self. But for me the sky is a shroud. It wraps me. It binds my eyes and mouth so that I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe. My eyes are wide now as I force myself to connect my body to my surroundings. From behind the chesterfield I can see nothing but parts of myself. The dirt under my fingernails, the grime burned into the skin of my hands, the sleeves of my jumper, baggy and bobbled with pilling. I’ve made the mistake of holding on to my breath for fear of being noticed. And now that I am safe and hidden and I can breathe again, I have held on for too long. I lower my head so the coat-shoe bundle is tight to my face and breathe out into it.

‘There’s a bottle under that cupboard,’ the woman says. ‘You open that up and I’ll put on a record.’

I track the sound of their bodies as they separate and bustle in different ends of the room. My heart is still beating too quickly and I worry that I am going to hyperventilate.

‘This Gamay?’ he asks, his words muffled but he stretches out the vowels just as my father used to.

From the sound of his voice, he is at the far end of the room by the dining table. There must be a cupboard there. His voice is low, on its knees. I concentrate on the words so that I can control my breathing and stave off the claustrophobia that threatens.

‘Or shall I get the champagne?’ he asks, his tone oily.

‘Champagne?’ she calls out. ‘What are we celebrating?’

‘Nothing,’ he says, to the sound of glass kissing from being handled. ‘Just, you know, there is the money.’

She laughs but there’s uncertainty in her voice.