Grace pushes against the glass; the jammed window gives way on the third attempt, her hand scraping on the frame. She jumps off the bathroom stool and holds the bleeding palm under cold water which seeps up her arm, soaking the new white shirt, the neat black suit.

‘Fuck.’

Receptionists should be immaculate, but there’s no time to change and nothing to change into. She trips over Martin’s shoes left in the doorway of the main room.

‘Bloody hell.’

She pulls the curtains back; the sun floods into the room. The sky looks flawless, that deceptive English blue. You can see a long way from the thirteenth floor. Thirteen was unlucky, Martin had worried; beggars can’t be choosers she’d shot back. Charley likes it. She watches foxes on the allotments from here, sleek shapes slipping by the rows of beans in the dusk. Blake wants an allotment but he’d need help and there wouldn’t be time; there’s ten minutes left some nights, half an hour if she’s lucky – just enough time to slip the red notebook from its hiding place on the top shelf under the pile of cookbooks she bought from Zimbabwe. She writes at night in secret, battling tiredness.

A muffled groan comes from the sofa. Martin is lying flat out with a cushion over his head. An ashtray brims beside him, three empty beer bottles on the table, papers on the floor. When she narrows her eyes, his outline becomes a sleeping animal, a beast from the plains, lifeless on the back of her grandfather’s lorry, chugging into the village at sun-up, blood dripping on the dust. Cocks crowing. Smoke from early fires. Miles and years away. Before success, before failure. Somewhere inside her husband is a young student with burning eyes, the English boy she’d followed over the sea. In the flat above a door slams as the tenants leave for work; that’s exactly how it began for them all those years ago, with the sound of a door slamming.

It had been late; most of the drinkers had already lurched out into the potholed streets of Harare. Beneath a layer of smoke, the tables were littered with empty glasses. The door to the bar banged open against the wall then slammed shut, followed by footsteps and the noise of something heavy being dumped on the counter.

‘We’re closed.’ Her back had been to the bar, sorting the till.

‘Oh gosh. Just my luck. Any chance at all of a glass of water?’