Rosaria misses me terribly, but she’s glad of all the things we did together, the fun we had, the conversations – and it doesn’t diminish her grief or her bewilderment or anger but she’s made a choice. She has chosen which pictures to remember. Right now, as she sits in the window of Chop Chop with her half-eaten prawn chow mein, she is remembering the time when she had flu and I made her a cake and took it round but because I’d put the butter icing on before the sponge was completely cold it had melted and flowed off the top and down the sides of the cake. When I handed over the tin, she prised off the lid, looked down at it and said, ‘Oh Lis’, puddle cake, my favourite.’ We sat on her bed, with snotty tissues on the bedside table, and each had a Lemsip because I was feeling a bit rough too and ate the puddle cake with spoons. Thank you, I think to myself, and she can’t see or hear me but all the same she puts her head on one side, scratches her scalp, rubs her lips together, sighs, and smiles.

Thank you Rosie, oh thank you for having the courage to remember happiness.

It is time to say goodbye.

25

I’m going to start by saying goodbye to some people I haven’t even said hello to yet: the others.

The woman in the orange trouser suit can’t hear me – I float alongside her, talking to her while she smokes and smiles. I stand in front of her and she passes right through me. I was right, she was just a random image, no consciousness at all.

The homeless man on Priestgate is still sitting on the kerb. He lifts his head when I speak to him, although he keeps his hood pulled up and stares at me with a hollow gaze. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ I ask, ‘but what happened to you?’ He looks at me. ‘Drugs, compounded by malnutrition and untreated pneumonia. You can’t get a GP without an address and anyway, I don’t like authority figures.’ I had wondered if he was a refugee or asylum seeker but his voice is quite posh. Public school, I’m guessing, starting with something Class B at the far end of the playing field, graduating to the hard stuff at university, perhaps.

‘Was it right here?’ I say, and he nods.

‘Want to know how many people walked past me before anyone called an ambulance?’ he says.

I shake my head but he tells me anyway. ‘Twenty-three.’