“I don’t have a drink. Not the kind you mean. There’s water in the tap. Help yourself.”

I got rid of all the alcohol in the house for the same reason I got rid of all the pills—even aspirin. I don’t keep sharp knives either. I worry about the thoughts that strike in the wee hours of the morning. (As a child I used to think they were called that because that was when I got up to go for a wee.) No, strike is too strong a word. They creep up like mice. Nihilistic thoughts about how nice it would be to make the pain stop for good. But I have nothing handy, and it seems like too much trouble to go out and buy something, and so I do nothing.

Moira pulls a bottle of Famous Grouse from her bag. “I came prepared.”

I sit and pull the blanket back over my knees. “I don’t want any whisky.”

“Pooh, it stinks in here. Sardines and old farts. You should crack a window once in a while.”

“It’s tuna. And it doesn’t worry me, so why should I bother?”

“Because it isn’t healthy. I swear flies are starting to settle on you. You have moss growing on your leeward side. If you fiddle with your hair any more, it will fall out.”

“What are you doing here, Moira?”

“I came to talk about sex. As in, when last did you have any?”

“Sex? Not that long ago, actually. It must be nearly two years now.”

“That recently?” She walks into the kitchen and starts opening cupboard doors. Looking for glasses, probably. I make no effort to point her in the right direction. “Who was the lucky man?”

“There were six of them actually. All men. All lucky. They broke into my father’s farmhouse. You can read all about it in the Booker Prize-winning novel by John Coetzee.”

Moira flinches. “I’m not talking about the rape, Lucy. That wasn’t sex, it was assault.”

“That’s funny, because it looked a lot like sex.”

“Rape is a violent act, not a sexual one. I’m sure your therapist has said the same thing.”

“She has. Repeatedly.”

“You used to say it yourself, remember?”

“I did. But then I got raped, and realised rape and sex are the same thing. The only difference between them turns on that tiny, subjective question of consent. The absence of consent doesn’t turn an otherwise sexual act into a non-sexual one. It’s not alchemy.”

Moira utters a crow of triumph as she finds glasses hidden behind stacked tins of peaches.Well, not glasses so much as plastic tumblers. Glasses can be smashed, and the resultant shards can be used to pierce skin. I switched to plastic crockery and glassware more than a year ago.