Anna Kearney lived in Grove Park, in a tangle of streets between the railway and the river. A thin woman who fell easily into anorexia, she had a constantly puzzled expression; kept his surname because she preferred it to her own. Her flat, originally council housing, was dark and cluttered. It smelled of handmade soap, Earl Grey tea, stale milk. Early on in her tenancy she had painted fish on the bathroom walls, papered the back of every door with letters from her friends, with Polaroid photographs and memos to herself. It was an old habit, but many of the memos were new.

If you don’t want to do something you don’t have to, Kearney read. Do only the things you can. Leave the rest.

“You look well,” he told her.

“You mean I look fat. I always know I’m too fat when people say that.”

He shrugged.

“Well, it’s nice to see you anyway,” he said.

“I’m having a bath. I was running it when you called.”

She kept some things for him in a room at the back of the flat: a bed, a chair, a small green-painted chest of drawers on top of which lay two or three dyed feathers, part of a triangular scented candle, and a handful of pebbles which still smelled faintly of the sea, arranged carefully in front of a framed photograph of himself at seven years old.

Though it was his own, the life these objects represented seemed unreadable and impassive. After staring at them for a moment, he rubbed his hands across his face and lit the candle. He shook the Shrander’s dice out of their little leather bag, threw them repeatedly. Larger than you would expect, made from some polished brownish substance which he suspected was human bone, they skittered and rolled between the other objects, throwing up patterns he could make nothing of. Before he stole the dice, he had cast Tarot cards for the same purpose: there were two or three decks in the chest of drawers somewhere, grubby from use but still in their original cartons.

“Do you want something to eat?” Anna called from the bathroom. There was a sound of her moving in the water. “I could make you something if you like.”

Kearney sighed.

“That would be nice,” he said.

He threw the dice again, then replaced them and looked round the room. It was small, with bare untreated floorboards and a window which looked out on the thick black foul-pipes of other flats. On the off-white wall above the chest of drawers, Kearney had years ago drawn two or three diagrams in coloured chalk. He couldn’t make anything of them, either.