It’s coming toward evening again and O is asleep on the sofa when I finally let myself in. I can hear the whuffle of her snores over the rain that tiptoes across the skylight. The skylight is one of the few advantages of living on the top floor. O refuses to leave this flat even though she has used a wheelchair off and on for the better part of three years. It’s because of the birds, she says. She keeps pigeons on the roof terrace. When I moved in, one of the conditions for living here was that I’d help look after the birds and do a bit of shopping for her. She rarely goes out; says it’s because the lift’s dodgy but I think she’s a touch agoraphobic.

The flat is stale. In the kitchen, I find the remains of reheated lasagne and half a carafe of coffee sludge. After feeding the pigeons, I dump the lot, wash up in O’s huge, scarred Belfast sink and take the rubbish out. By the time I’ve climbed three flights of stairs a second time, I’m so tired that I lurch like a sailor on my way over to O’s workstation, which is open to my dreamwork calendar. O is a Virgo and loves to organise people. After she took me under her wing and started setting me up as a proper business, I offered to pay her but she just looked at me with those chilly eyes of hers. She’s loaded and says she believes in paying it forward. I never intended this to happen, much less to go on this long, but there’s no doubt she has the contacts I so desperately need.

My diary looks bleak. O has managed to book me with a regular client on Sunday the 19th at 2 a.m. She’s written: ‘One of the hairdressers downstairs, can’t remember which one, having anxiety dreams. They never go to bed before 2. OK?’

I sigh and sign off. I get obscene amounts of sleep, but hardly ever in my own bed.

‘Hope the new bookings aren’t too much,’ O says, making me jump.

‘I thought you were down for the count.’

‘Only napping. Turned in a draft of the Damselfly report today. Bit of a press to get it done.’

‘Ooh, excellent! Nice one.’

O makes an obscene amount of money doing something incomprehensible with IT. I gather that she’s some sort of security consultant, but she’s cagey about it and I’m sure I wouldn’t understand anyway. Given that she owns the entire building and rents out the flats below, she has no real need to work; according to Muz, her motivations are all internal. ‘She’s packing so much brainpower that she has to keep her mind active or she’d go mad,’ he said the day I met him, as he helped me carry my stuff up three flights of stairs. Muz is in his early fifties but hard as a rock physically, and even that first time I met him, being around him made me feel safe. When we paused on a landing for me to catch my breath, he added, ‘Keeping busy takes her mind off being sick. A word to the wise, love: she hates talking about it.’