‘Go to bed,’ I say aloud. ‘You’ve had enough.’

‘I hate being in bed,’ O says. ‘I won’t be able to sleep. I’ll just lie there with my brain spinning.’

She gets like this sometimes. O is not cut out to be old, much less sick. She has this restlessness about her, a fierce focus. People are supposed to mellow with age, but if O can dial it back, I’ve never seen her do it.

Then she says, ‘You know what really gets to me? Those post-surgery bras my great-niece sent me. They don’t fit right across the back, not one of them.’

‘So return them.’

‘Can’t. Edgar sat on them. They’re furry.’

‘I’ll ask Shandy to alter them if you want. She’s brilliant. Give me the one you’ve got on that does fit and she’ll match it.’

‘What, now?’

‘Yeah, just shimmy on out of it. I won’t look.’

When she hands it to me, still warm, I shove it into my bag before collecting the others from her room. My problems are tiny compared to hers.

‘Ah, I feel so free. Let’s go outside,’ she says. Having removed her bra, she is now left holding the little flask of schnapps she usually keeps hidden there (and which could explain most of her discomfort with the fit, but I can’t say anything because she thinks I don’t know about it).

It’s windy out on the roof, which is probably what we both need. O puts the brake on her chair to stop herself being blown across the flat rooftop, and I check to make sure all the pigeons are roosting and that their water bottles are full. The pigeons have a lovely, calming effect. Once I made an ASMR pigeon video up here; I wonder how many hits it’s had since I last checked. I miss doing ASMR. Wish I could get back to it. I felt better about my life when I was making things for people. Even if your own life is a mess, it’s lovely to be able to help others.

There’s a bird from O’s sister Daphne today. I turn to smile at O, but her expression flickers into a sort of wary tension. Then I remember that she did sprain her wrist in a pigeon-related incident, and she’s probably still in pain. So I grab ahold of Daphne’s pigeon myself and divest it of the message attached to its leg. This is a routine thing. The message will be addressed to ‘Agent O’ and O will write back to ‘Agent D’.

‘We’re the Pigeon Sisters,’ O explained when I first moved in, and she chuckled so much that I looked up the reference and traced it to an old American TV show. Honestly, both O and Daphne are the most unlikely Pigeon Sisters you could ever imagine – maybe that’s why she thinks it’s so funny. Daphne lives in a high-tech care home in Dorking where they let the residents keep pets. Apparently O arranged for the birds to be installed in a dovecote where Daphne can visit them, and they fly back and forth regularly with messages.