So too his mother, the woman who had chivvied him through childhood, wiped his snot, ironed his shirts and simultaneously endured the vagaries of his violent alcoholic father, changed as he tapped the keys of his typewriter; the real Margaret Bannister disappeared just as in reality she had retreated from the neighbourhood and his immediate life by selling her house and moving elsewhere. So smoothly did she leave that Claud, passing his old home a week after her going, found himself querying whether he had ever lived in it.

He stood in the road staring at the house, noting the small changes already effected by the new owner. His parents’ curtains still hung inside the windows, but tied back; there was a new knocker out of proportion with the size of the door; the new owner had whitened the grey slate step; a white cat stared bleakly from beside the scraper, freshly painted black, no longer coated with clods of mud from his mother’s gardening clogs. Standing in the road he expected his mother to come round the house carrying the trug which held her fork and trowel, the garden gloves she never remembered to wear; she would be followed by her striped cat who lived under the delusion that it was a dog.

The door opened suddenly and a stranger stood in the doorway. The white cat nipped past her into the house. The woman spoke, articulating clearly. ‘Can I help you?’ (She was grey, one of the grey people.)

Claud became aware that she was nervous, that his mother’s cat had been dead some years, that perhaps the picture he had seen in his mind’s eye might never have existed. ‘I am just casing the joint,’ he said angrily.

The new owner shut the door smartly in his face. Perhaps she would telephone the police? Claud fished in his pocket for a pencil and the notebook in which he jotted escaping ideas. He wrote: ‘I am only Claud Bannister, the erratic son of the previous owner, no need to panic.’ He pushed the note through the letterbox. The letterbox snapped at his fingers; it was new, like the knocker. His parents’ letterbox had had a weak spring, it got stuck open letting in unnecessary draughts in cold weather. He was assailed by sadness, felt fierce pangs of remorse. He had so often been beastly to his mother. He shouted: ‘Fuck you, go to hell,’ bending down and yelling through the letterbox. It nipped his fingers again; he turned and ran, racing down the road to take shelter in the nearest public house.

He went to bed that night rather drunk and dreamed of a procession of women, none of whom were exactly his mother or Amy or Mavis; his dream turned to nightmare as the woman clasped in his arms turned into Ann Kennedy: ‘Christ, what are you doing in my bed?’ He woke trembling, sniffed, smelled pepper. ‘Laura?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where have you been?’