I wandered back into my room without even thinking and only when I’d been looking at my phone for a while did I realise I was wasting our last night on the planet, which had felt so normal for a minute, despite the diminishing debris, that it had also seemed consummately wastable. I started doing my automatic hair-smoothing again and was just trying to suppress this when Dan appeared in the doorway and deus-ex-machinaed me. ‘Come look at the skirting boards,’ he said.

I followed him into the bedroom. ‘Very beautiful,’ I said, although they were not beautiful, they were still skirting boards, just clean.

‘Well,’ he said, dusting his hands of dust, of house, of me. ‘There’s nothing left to say to each other. It was fun living with you.’

‘Shh,’ I said. It was not always fun. ‘Should we get food?’

‘Sure.’

‘Uber Eats?’

‘No!’ He took out his phone and pretended to be a grumpy person waiting for their meal, staring at the phone and shaking the screen. ‘Why are you going that way? No, why are you going that way?’ He shook it again. ‘They’re real people, they’re not pneumatic tubes. What do you have in the kitchen?’

‘I . . . don’t want to tell you,’ I said.

In the rusting refrigerator, which he would leave with me, was an open jar of gherkins, a tub of Nuttelex, and a plastic bag of trusty bread.

‘Why are you keeping the bread in the fridge? You are a whole new person.’

I had done this because otherwise it looked too serial-killerish, gherkins and Nuttelex in the fridge and nothing else. I tried putting a bag of rice in there but somehow it looked worse.

I explained this. ‘It still looks pretty serial-killerish,’ he said.

‘Nooo,’ I said, inspecting it. ‘Good things come in threes. Do you want a gherkin sandwich?’

‘I guess so,’ he said.

We sat up on the sloping balcony, munching on our sandwiches, watching distant joggers jog through Princes Park.

‘I should’ve used the park more,’ he said.

‘You should’ve done a lot of things.’

He looked at me. ‘Like what?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I sighed. ‘Probably nothing. You should have no regrets about your time in Brunswick.’

He swallowed the last part of his sandwich.

‘You don’t have to live with this person,’ he said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that. It’s concerning that he’s literally the first person you asked.’

‘Not even really asked,’ I said.

‘Not even really person.’

‘Where is he right now?’ I sighed. I looked at the park speculatively. But I knew he was probably home in Richmond, packing. Although it would be nice if every answer was revealing, sometimes they only revealed the dimness of the question. And then the stupid questioners had their own complications, bringing in their foolish minds and bitter histories.