This thought gives me courage and I approach him. He is wearing the heavy jacket, the donkey jacket. He has the hat pulled down low, just as he did then, and in the second before he turns towards me, I know that when he does, he will have the sea-green scarf covering the lower half of his face, just below the bulbous nose, the large and watery eyes. He turns without movement, swivelling as he sits. The watery eyes stare at me. He doesn’t pull down the sea-green scarf or move any part of his face but he speaks nonetheless. I hear him quite distinctly. His tone of voice is soft, mocking, almost – but not quite – as if he pities me. I have never felt so cold.

‘You think it will all end, don’t you?’ he says, and his voice is leaden with pain. ‘You think it will all be over, forgotten, but there’s no forgetting for the likes of you or me.’

I can feel a grim smile beneath the scarf, a pleasure in my horror. ‘Haven’t you worked that out by now? Your little fancies won’t change that, my girl.’ He can read my mind, just like I can with the living. Even though he is motionless on the bench, it is as though he is enlarging. I am so cold.

‘It’s just going to go on and on and on … not just for us, or them, for all of them.’

So he can see the others too. I back away and he shrinks a little.

‘I’m not like you.’ I say it calmly but I know he can hear me and my voice is crystal clear, a ringing bell. ‘I’m different. I didn’t do what you did. I’m not the same.’

The eyes above the scarf are still staring and cold. ‘Oh really? Is that what you think? Then why are you stuck here?’

I don’t have an answer for this. I only know that he disgusts me. I am not like him.

It’s all I can say, but even as I say it, I can hear in my own thoughts how feeble it sounds as a retort, how flimsy a defence of my existence. ‘I know I am not like you.’ It is a row of seven monosyllables and it is all I am certain about.

‘Are you sure?’ He has moved towards me again, enlarged again. ‘I hate to be the one to break it to you but we do have something in common.’

He is very close to me now, his heavy face, the large watery eyes. ‘I bet you were a cutie when you were five or six,’ he says. ‘I bet you did that tarty thing you all do, big eyes looking up as if you don’t know what you’re doing.’

And then I guess.

*