He finished eating and picked up his phone, which was lying by his plate. I felt a rush of disappointment. Really? He punched a few buttons. I looked down at my plate.

As he put his phone back on the table, my phone, in my kimono pocket, vibrated. I extracted it and looked. It was a text from Matty. Your chair or mine? Xxx

I texted back. Yours xxx He pushed his plate to one side and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, ostentatiously, then turned his chair to accommodate me.

*

One day, a few days later, I was reading, on the sofa. He was sitting opposite me on the armchair with his feet on the coffee table. He had been drinking a bottle of beer and doing some work emails on his laptop, tapping away from time to time while it was open on his lap, when I looked up and saw he was staring at me. I began a smile but never concluded it because I realised, as the instinctive movement of my mouth began, that he was not going to return it.

‘Pallor, algor, rigor, livor.’

‘What?’ I asked. I was still waiting for him to smile.

He took a swig from his beer bottle, lifting it high but still watching me, tipping the contents down his throat in large gulps that made his Adam’s apple move up and down although the rest of him stayed entirely still. He lowered the bottle and put it down, closed the lid of his laptop. ‘The stages of death, what happens to the body I mean, not that it means anything to you.’ During the final phrase of this remark, his tone was openly contemptuous.

I wondered if he was drunk. Either way, I no longer wanted to sit beneath his gaze. I wasn’t in the mood. I rose and put my book down. As I walked past him, on my way to the bathroom, he reached out a hand and took hold of my wrist, arresting me. He held it firmly. I wanted to ask him, ‘Are you drunk?’ but didn’t dare.

‘Ever wondered,’ he said, swinging my wrist lightly from side to side, ‘what it’d be like to fuck a corpse?’

I pulled my arm out of his grasp and said, ‘No, and I think people who do are right sickos.’ He let me go.

*

That night, in bed, he said, ‘Lie still. Go on. Close your eyes. Don’t do anything. Pretend you’re dead.’

‘Matthew …’ I protested.