‘I’m hungry,’ she said to him. She hadn’t eaten all day. ‘Come on, keep me company.’

She stood up and offered a hand, but he pushed himself to his feet without her help. The marks on his neck were violently red, and Alison could see bruising too, a purplish, bluish hue high on his neck where the rope had been tightest. This was the day that Peter had tried to kill himself and then changed his mind; this was the day he could’ve died. But there’d be tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and together, they’d cope.

She heated up some tomato soup and made sardines on toast too, and Peter watched her, but didn’t eat anything. He was quite calm and considered, though, and he told her he’d been planning her escape for a good while now, setting money aside every week, and he’d made her apply for a passport three years ago, did she remember? She’d been awkward about it at the time, asked what was the point, but in the end, she’d signed the form that he’d completed for her, and had gone and had her photo taken in the booth at Woolworths. Alison said, ‘Oh God, you’re right. I forgot about that. Did you send it off then?’

He nodded. ‘I did, and it came here, and now it’s in an old Oxo tin with the savings I’ve put by. Nigh on a hundred and forty pounds.’

She gawped at him. A hundred and forty pounds! Her own savings from her job at the supermarket were nil. Occasionally she paid the gas or the electric with her wages, but more often they were spent on music, or – less often – clothes.

‘It’s so you can take off, if you have to,’ he said. ‘And I’d like you to do that, now.’

‘But, Peter, I’ve only got a year left at school,’ Alison said. ‘What about my A Levels?’

‘Do ’em another time. Or do wi’out ’em.’

She looked at him askance. There was no logic to what he said. This was just a panicked reaction to the events of the past forty-eight hours. English, French, History: these were her A Levels, and she planned to take them and get herself to university.

‘It’s in my top drawer,’ he said.

‘What is?’

‘Your tin. In my bedroom, top drawer, underneath everything. I should’ve told you before.’

She looked down at her soup. Before he tried to hang himself, he meant. As if she’d have been able to go anywhere, with him dead. As if she’d have been able to function at all. She continued eating, mechanically feeding her empty stomach, like shovelling coal into an engine or filling up a car, and she listened to him speaking to her in his temporarily strangled voice, on and on in a kind of rasping whisper, and she wished he’d stop.