‘That’s lucky,’ says Joel. ‘So, they took you back to the police station to interview you?’

Douglas shifts in his seat, looking sheepish. ‘Well, when the police started talking to me I wasn’t too happy. You know when you’re at the stage of drinking when you just want to pass out and be left alone. There might have been quite a lot of swearing on my part and I might have resisted their help. So they took me back to the cells.

‘This morning they told me that the guy I punched said it was more of an accident than an aggravated incident and so they didn’t charge me. No big deal.’

He shrugs it away and starts to stir two sugar lumps into his coffee.

‘Oh, right, no big deal, did you hear that, Edie?’ says Joel, his tone so unlike anything I’ve heard from him before that I’m expecting steam to come out of his ears any minute. ‘You realise that if you had got charged you’d have a criminal record. Do you know how much of an impact that would have on the rest of your life?’

‘Look, Joel, I’ve got a pretty raging headache, and I got zero sleep on that bloody slab that they pass off as a bed. I could do without this right now.’

‘You could do without it? Oh, I’m terribly sorry, we’ll talk later about how you are taking a pretty privileged life and flushing it down the fucking toilet.’

People in the café are starting to look at us and I can’t blame them.

‘Tell me what you really think, why don’t you? I just had the shittiest night of my life and I could really do with eating some food and getting some sleep. If I needed a lecture I would have got the police to phone my mum.’

Joel looks daggers at him but he bites his tongue. Douglas stirs his coffee with such force that it spills over the edges.

‘Have you spoken to Suz this morning?’ I ask in a gentler tone. ‘Does she know what’s happened?’

He continues to stir his coffee.

‘You’ve got to tell her, she’s your wife,’ says Joel, exasperated. ‘You are still married to her, aren’t you?’

Douglas stops stirring, but he doesn’t look up or say anything and it slowly all fits into place. Why he hasn’t called her … Why Suz and Isla are always too busy to come down with him …

‘When?’ says Joel, his anger visibly ebbing away.

‘About four months ago.’

‘Four months?’ says Joel.

I put my hand on Douglas’s back and rub it.