He grabbed his wife’s hand, and squeezed it tightly. She had such small hands and feet, she was so fragile.

‘Don’t worry, Josephine. Knowing our Jessie, she’s probably shacked up with some lowlife she met last night. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?’

Josephine didn’t reply; this was upsetting her now. She didn’t need her husband to remind her of her daughter’s failings. She pulled her hand roughly away from Michael’s, and he knew he had hurt her feelings. But he couldn’t tell her the truth, that Jessie had dropped off the radar and no one seemed to know where she was.

‘I better get myself back, Michael, I have a few things I need to sort out today.’

Michael felt his anger rising at Josephine’s words, but he swallowed it down as always. All his wife actually did, day in and day out, was repair her make-up, paint her nails and rearrange her boxes of crap. For the first time in years, he felt he needed her, wanted her to be like she was in the old days, when he could tell her anything, and she would advise him, listen to him. He didn’t like having to admit to himself that his lovely wife Josephine was like a stranger to him these days. She would choose her old crap over him, over Jake, over Jessie, if she had to. He had done his best to see his wife happy; now he wasn’t so sure he had done the right thing by her. All he had accomplished was to allow Josephine to live a life without any meaning. He had stood back and let it happen. The doctors had given her pills, but no one challenged her or told her that her life was odd, that she was odd. The psychiatrist talked to her for hours in her rooms; he paid the fucker a small fortune, but Josephine just got worse. Looking at her now, he wondered how he could have let it happen. When she had first started bulk-buying food, he should have put his foot down then. They rarely made love any more, and they talked only in generalities of things that were of no real importance. All they had in common was Jake.

He could see Josephine watching him warily, and he wanted to grab hold of her, drag her into bed with him, and give her a serious seeing to, like in the old days. But he didn’t feel he could do that to her any more. She wasn’t the old Josephine, the woman he had married – this was a woman who lived inside herself, whose every waking moment was lived in a vacuum.

‘Are you happy, Josephine? I mean really happy?’