“If you need to get to work—” he offers.

She takes the opening. “Thanks, yes, I only took half-day leave. You should know where everything is, but if not, text me.” She hands him the keys and then, awkwardly, fishes a parcel from her bag. “I made this for you. All that time in the hospital. Maybe it will be useful in the winter.” She clatters out the door before he can look. When he pulls the paper off, it’s a scarf, clearly hand-made, the colour of the night sky with flashes of brightness.

•

Having decided not to nap, they start sorting through his father’s belongings, but this quickly becomes overwhelming. To start with, Henry sets aside anything Janet might remotely be interested in, but very soon he is tossing everything he can into bin bags from a roll he unearthed in the kitchen. He had no idea things had gotten this bad, and wonders why Janet didn’t say anything, didn’t try to intervene.

After a couple of hours, he starts to feel like a bad host and suggests a walk around the neighbourhood. The sky is completely overcast, and the light has a glassy, heavy quality. Henry and Revathi stop at a provision shop for washing powder and cockroach spray.

Walking around Tiong Bahru, Henry realises he was wrong. The buildings might be the same, but it has unquestionably changed. Of course it has, he’s been gone so long. Several times, he sees faces that seem familiar, only to stop himself just before waving. His memories of the area are two or three decades old, and the people he holds in his mind couldn’t possibly look like that any longer. A whole new set of people have moved in, smartly-dressed and wielding iPhones.

The ground floor of these buildings are taken up by shops, but very few are as he remembers, just the occasional tze char restaurant with its sizzling wok smells, kitchens spilling out onto back alleys where cats lurk for scraps. They walk past a yoga studio, a bookshop, even an art gallery. He sees cafés with outdoor seating, trendy expat mums and teenagers with Macbook Airs. They have cappuccinos and little French pastries. It became Hoxton when I wasn’t looking, he thinks. It’s disquieting, but Revathi shrugs each time he apologises. “I’d be surprised if gentrification somehow missed Singapore, it happens everywhere else.”

“This isn’t the heartlands any more,” he says.

“Of course not, I was joking earlier. Flats around here are going for a million dollars. You should seriously come back more often; the country you have in your head isn’t there any more—everything’s moving on.”

He’s thinking like an old man. Stop, he admonishes himself. It’s good that things are getting better. What he wouldn’t have given, as a teenager, to have a bookshop on his doorstep. And now here is one, a whimsical little place with orange crate bookshelves and a cat on the counter. He wanders into its coolness and is seduced into buying a small stack to add to his reading pile.