I stay outside, looking at the plain front of the building lit by the single light on the tall post next to the bins. Someone has left several bulging supermarket bags, their handles knotted, in a pile to the left of the front door. There’s a soggy shoebox on top of them. It’s nothing much, a flat in this place, you might think, unless it was all you had. There is no sign of Matty’s car but he could have changed it, or be out. I hover outside for a while, watching the windows. There are some lights on in the first- and second-floor flats on the right but the left-hand side of the building, my side, appears to be in darkness. The bedroom overlooks the front and the curtains are open, suggesting nobody is home.

The thought of Matty sleeping in my old bed, alone or with company – I’m not sure which prospect is more nauseating.

My parents would have inherited the flat – I died intestate, they were my next of kin. I wonder if they were too decent to ask Matty to leave. It would have been the last thing on their minds, in their grief, selling it and getting the ten per cent deposit I had put down. Nothing would make me happier than to think they might have benefited in some small way, a new hallway carpet, a decent holiday: I would have been delighted for them to spend their tiny inheritance in whatever way made them happy. Now I know they have separated, I reflect gloomily that they probably had to sell it to pay for solicitors’ letters and removal vans, all the sad costs of dismantling a household and creating two separate ones in different parts of the country. The money I saved up to build a home, a domestic life, ended up helping them demolish theirs. I wonder what they did with my stuff – my clothes, my books. They wouldn’t have wanted to throw them away. It’s all in boxes somewhere, no doubt, taking up space that neither of them have any more.

It’s more than eighteen months since I died. Surely Matty has gone by now. As I watch, a light comes on, not in the bedroom but in the bathroom. It has a frosted window that doesn’t even open, as useless as the tiny balcony out the back – that’s why the bathroom needed an extractor fan.

It feels like a gesture of some sort, that small illumination, the yellow square filtered through the glass. I have the strange sensation that whoever is inside the flat is signalling to me.