Greta and Peggy were close in the dark. Both awake in bed. Listening to Heidi and Dell, who were shouting – but only sometimes. Sometimes they were whispering loudly. They were upset, with each other possibly, but it was hard to tell. Greta’s mouth was close to Peggy’s forehead. Somehow Peggy had ended up further down the bed. Neither of them moved. They were trying to listen. They were both listening hard, barely breathing – trying to stay completely still so they could hear. Nothing Heidi and Dell said made any sense. At times, Peggy and Greta couldn’t even tell which one of them was shouting. Their voices sounded strange, like they both felt completely unwatched. If they weren’t as angry as they were, they’d have remembered that Peggy and Greta could hear everything they were saying, but they must have forgotten in the heat of it all. Peggy and Greta had never heard them like this before – speaking in shorthand, finishing each other’s sentences in a weird cadence that sounded more like thought than speech. Peggy and Greta never talked to each other like this. It was like Heidi and Dell had been doing it longer, had become practised. It was disconcerting. Then, they fell into audible phrases.

‘It’s not,’ one of them said.

‘People would disagree,’ said the other.

‘You can’t keep fucking with their head.’

‘Telling the truth is not fucking with people’s heads.’ A frustrated groaning sound from the one that said this.

Then nothing but the sound of them moving around, waving their arms at each other perhaps. Incoherently saying things. Only the odd phrase or word making sense in all the strange noise. ‘Not here,’ Peggy and Greta picked out. ‘A long way away.’ Or were they talking about time? ‘Suspicious.’ ‘Dangerous.’ ‘Secret.’ They kept talking about a game. Were they saying that the other was playing some sort of game? Or was someone else entirely playing a game with them?

‘You need to come clean.’ They were sure that was Heidi.

And Dell laughed – it could have been to demonstrate how stupid Heidi was being, but it could have been exasperation. The sound of someone who wanted to give up but couldn’t.