‘Look at those sparks,’ she says.

‘If you tell me it’s his spirit going up to Heaven, I’m going inside now,’ Andrew says and although he tries to make it sound like a joke, they both know it isn’t.

‘No, I wasn’t going to say that,’ she said. ‘He was a fucker. If he’s anywhere he’s down there or, I dunno, trapped somewhere for all eternity. But I think that burning that stuff was good, for us, like, it can still be the past, can’t it, burning up, turning into sparks, can’t it?’

‘Is this the bit where you tell me we have a choice?’ Andrew says, and I’m surprised by how bitter he sounds. ‘How we can’t control what happened to us when we were children but we’re adults now and now we have a choice, how today is the first day of the rest of our lives or tomorrow is another day or some shit like that? How’s the yoga going, by the way? Learned to knit your own falafel yet?’

Sensibly, Ruth ignores this outburst. ‘We do,’ she says quickly. ‘You know we do, we make a hundred choices every day.’

‘That’s different.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Yeah well,’ he says. The bitterness in his tone has not abated. ‘I choose not to think the past is past and the rest of our lives goes forward from here and I can put it behind me and all that crap. How d’you like them onions?’

‘I’m just …’

‘Lets him off the hook, doesn’t it? He doesn’t deserve to get let off the hook, he should have gone to prison and rotted and been scared to take a shower.’ He has a point.

‘He’s dead, he doesn’t know either …’

‘I know he’s dead! That’s what fucking annoys me. He didn’t deserve to get off that lightly.’

There is a small silence. The flickering orange flecks fly up from the bonfire and there is a crack from the very heart of the fire as something, a piece of wood perhaps, collapses onto the embers beneath. When she speaks, Ruth’s voice is so quiet I can hardly hear her. ‘You really think he got off lightly? You think he would have done that, could have done it I mean, done what he did, if he’d got off lightly?’

Andrew is silent for a while.

Ruth says, softly, ‘We’ve been there, and now we have, one thing I know was he didn’t do it because he thought it would get him off the hook, he did it because he was in proper agony. He got his punishment. I’m not just saying it to make us both feel better, seriously. Fuck this, you got a cigarette?’