Thank you, she says. Tomorrow at two forty, the eighth floor, lift core nine. But before she’s finished repeating it the phone has gone dead. She stands in the kitchenette. Underfoot, the squares of yellow linoleum tile are curling up from the floorboards. She edges one almost entirely loose with her toe then stamps it back down. Immediately, the woman below starts shouting. When they first moved in, she brought around home-made samosas and they accepted with exaggerated delight. But since then she’s complained about them more than a dozen times: non-existent parties, imaginary fights. The landlord says he knows, it’s happened before, but keep the noise down anyway. Now when she brings them food they thank her politely and tip it straight in the bin, even though that seems somehow unlucky. We’ve been looking for a reason to leave, is what they’ve been saying to each other. The pots and pans she clatters at midnight. The rotting piles of cardboard heaped along the fence. The sobbing arguments with invisible people.

The shouting fades to a grumble, then stops.

Tomorrow, two forty. The eighth floor, lift core nine. 104

There are two sorts of gin and a Japanese whisky on top of the fridge. A dusty bottle of Angostura bitters. An ancient cherry brandy, used once for cooking, and an unopened bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. They used to drink that in shots, when she was at school: Baileys and sambuca, a Slippery Nipple. A Screaming Orgasm had amaretto and Kahlúa in it too. It was the height of sophistication, at the Wolsey or the Boom Boom Room. She shudders. She has no idea where the bottle came from. She picks up the whisky, then puts it back. She could text Adjo: Pick up a bottle of white wine on your way home? But he’d know instantly, and she doesn’t want to break it to him like that.

In the high, pale light of these lingering evenings, they have taken to sitting out on their roof terrace – not strictly a terrace at all, but the asphalt-covered roof of the building below, the elderly brother and sister’s flat. There is a straggly jasmine in a pot that the previous tenants left behind, and she has bought some herbs ready-planted in a plastic tray: parsley, dill, rosemary and sage. The city exhales the sullen heat of the day. Music booms from a car pulled up below, the reek of weed, and they watch the aeroplanes forging their silvery paths in the almost imperceptibly darkening sky.