The building that houses the Department has views on three sides, all of them grey. But on smoke-free winter afternoons, the sunsets arrive. When Lorna was here she’d pause to admire them, lingering by the windows on her way from the kitchen with her mug of tea. Sometimes I’d join her there to stretch my back. The sunsets put me in mind of a house that I used to drive past every day in Cold Duck Parade. Squished between a Forty Winks and a tyre mart, it had the wounded look of a rental: broken venetians, brick fence gappy where a car had crashed through, wrought-iron gate flaking rust. But every winter, big pink flowers covered the tree in the yard. The drought finished off the tree a few years back, and the house was bulldozed last month. While the site awaits development, a billboard has appeared. Is Your Iron Causing Constipation? it asks.

With Lorna gone, I stay away from the sunsets. They have the same power to disturb as those cups of pink light. At the sight of them, something inside me would uncurl. The horizon in front of my eyes grew distant and bright. I wondered if the sunsets affected Lorna the same way, pricking her with awareness of something greater. Her fighting chin lifted when she stood at the window, but whatever fight there might have once been in her had gone missing long ago. One day she asked me, ‘What will happen to Tex when I die? Or when I’m too old to take care of his needs?’ She sipped from her mug and said, ‘You can’t count on Frank.’

In the last restructure, Lorna was let go. It was largely cost-cutting – it always is. But not only that. Lorna was turning up with hair that looked big and exhausted. Latterly, she forgot to do things or messed them up. She missed deadlines. She started calling in ill. Then she really was ill, hospitalised with dysentery. She couldn’t afford bottled water and had been slipshod about filtering. When she resurfaced she looked as if she needed a coat of paint. No one was surprised when she was called in to see Russ.

Lorna came out of Russ’s office and crossed to her desk. She dropped her photo of Tex into her bag. She put on her jacket, did up the buttons and heaved up the lapels. The strangest emptiness crept over me, as if I were losing much more than a colleague. To this day, I don’t like thinking about it. It’s never made sense.

Ikea, the administrative officer in Evaluations, also had to leave at around that time. Her brother had been discovered attending a clandestine mosque. It emerged that Ikea had once been called Zaynab. She’d changed her name, as so many Muslims did when the ban came in. Since practising Islam is a terrorist offence, the whole family was repatriated at once.