Lydia joins them after a few seconds. He glances at her, that turned-up nose he’s loved for nearly two decades. He wonders what she’d do if he told her. They’ve always identified as over-thinkers. Lydia once said, ‘We’re mad as hatters, we are,’ when they had spent their whole evening worrying about ovulation sticks and a skin rash on a French bulldog, respectively. They’d cackled into their dinner. The next day, a tiny set of worry dolls had arrived at the practice, with a note from Lydia, via Amazon Prime: For your worries, and mine, it had said. But those dolls can’t help him now, and neither can she. This isn’t a worry. This is a real problem.

‘I’m tired,’ Joe says, rubbing at his head, trying to explain his behaviour. Cathy’s eyes light on him.

‘You were rolling around in bed last night,’ Lydia says, through a mouthful of fruit. ‘Lunatic.’

‘I know. I was hot.’

As he chews on a sausage, his bowels seem to liquefy. He can hardly believe yesterday ended and today came. That a world like this exists. Cathy accepts a cup of tea from a teapot. Joe watches it pour from the spout, a not-quite-cylindrical stream.

‘I slept fine,’ Cathy says. Her face is serene. She’s a great actress. Joe can’t help but study her. Is it easy for her?

‘I want pancakes,’ Joe says pointedly to her. ‘Do you?’

‘Sure,’ she says, scraping her chair back. They walk over to the buffet and stand a few metres away from everybody. Joe ladles the pancake mixture on to the hotplate and glumly watches it. He glances over at Paul. He’s still clutching at the jigsaw pieces. He loves to hold as many things as possible in his fists.

‘How do you seem so fine?’ Joe says to Cathy.

‘I’m not fine.’

Joe’s always been a ruminator, even though he tries not to be. He called Evan a twat under his breath at work three weeks ago and has thought about it most days since. Evan had performed an unnecessary scan, the money from which enabled him to hit his financial target, which shouldn’t have been a surprise to Joe, who has always known him to be a tosser. His entire personality is formed around the fact that he one day wants to own a Maserati, when, actually, he is flat broke following his divorce. He uses myself when he means me. So, he is a twat. But still.

He wishes he could be a pragmatist, like Cathy.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she says in a low voice, eyes down to the buffet, ostensibly looking at the pancake batter swirling in a vat. ‘All right? I slept fucking terribly.’

‘Did you dream?’ Joe says.

‘Yup,’ Cathy says. She smiles sadly as their eyes meet, an eerie feeling settling over Joe of dreaming the same dream as his sister. ‘You?’

‘Yeah, arrests, mostly,’ Joe says, prodding at the pancake, wishing he did have his worry dolls, after all, if only to confide in. It’s so funny how the sky is still so blue, Paul still loves holding things in his tiny fat fists, pancakes still cook, in this, the afterlife.