Sipping vodka, I prepared myself for that feeling. When they’re gone. The juxtaposition of the emptiness and screams of their presence. Although, nothing could be as bad as last time. It’s not like in the movies: the police don’t deal with everything when someone violently kills themselves. I had to arrange it all myself. When the people had left, the bathroom was cleaner, brighter than it’d ever been before. Except it wasn’t. It was foul and tainted, and I continued to scrub at it every day, tile by tile. Unaware the contamination was a different kind.

The door slammed, activating the automatic light, and as I climbed the staircase, I must have looked dead myself. Like one of Dale’s zombies, I stared ahead, unblinking, until I noticed a crumple of colour from the corner of my eye. It was his paisley handkerchief. Creased, dirty. Fallen from his pocket as they manoeuvred the stretcher. I picked it up, immune to the usual repulsion I’d feel at such a thing, and pressed it against my heart.

Inside, I took another swig, which tipped my alcohol content and caused my vision to double, bringing with it the sound of a man’s voice. Soft and gravelly like his.

I walked down the hall. ‘Edward?’

It was all different. As was to be expected. Like Dr Williams’s office. Like home. Devoid of life, incomplete. Cyril lacked humour. The diving helmet was now pointless.

I reached the lounge. The TV was still on. A man dressed in a chef’s outfit was instructing viewers on how to make game pie. It wasn’t Edward. And I relinquished the hope that perhaps I’d dreamt it all. That he’d be sitting in his chair interrogating me as to whether I’d bought his Bovril.

I turned it off. The silence boomed.

After cleaning the sick off the carpet and switching on the heating, I sat in my chair. His, though vacant, was full of him. The concave indentation he’d created over all those years. The layers of dust formed from his skin.

‘He’s fucking left us, Ursula,’ I said, dropping back into the seat, gluing the bottle to my lips.

I know you don’t believe in signs, Samuel, but when coming up for air, I glanced over to your window. And I swear the broken cuckoo, Colin, sprang from his door, causing me to jump and slosh drink from the bottle onto my skirt. Ten times it tweeted.

‘Edward?’ I said to it, and it retracted back inside.

The bottle was near empty, so I necked the dregs before dropping it to the floor. I don’t remember feeling drunk. Though I must have been. Grief and shock internalized everything. Feelings multiplied with nowhere to escape. I may have conquered the usual slurring and falling about, but inside I was more pissed than Mum on a Saturday night.