What on earth was the Swedish boy’s name? She searched for a minute, but found nothing except a trace of darkness like a swipe of fresh black paint covering up the place in her head where the name should have been. Gone. Like the name of Mrs Samson’s eldest, who they were only talking about yesterday morning while Mrs S hoovered around the bed and ‘set things straight’. And the names of a dozen flowers, and ... what was it, what was it she had forgotten the other day? Something else, the title of an opera she liked, or the name of the man who read the news on the radio which she knew perfectly well and had known for years. What she did remember often seemed quite random, as though her life were an old lumber room through which memory moved like a drunk with a torch, and she would find herself with a photographic recollection of the meat counter at Tesco’s, or remembering word for word a conversation with Toni about her poodle. She didn’t want to go with that in her mind, a last image of Toni’s poodle hovering transcendentally above her like the parrot in the Flaubert story.

Ding! Ding! Ding!...