“Don’t leave your… ”

“Mug in my room. Yes! I know!” She stalked out, her bare feet slapping against the tiled floor. Donald thought about following her, to…

(to what? To apologise? To berate her further?)

(to carry on the conversation and see if he could drag it back into a better place?)

… but instead he put the kettle on to boil and spooned out a mound of Nescafé.

What had she meant, ‘I’m not pregnant’? Why throw that in? Was it a coy way of telling him she was now having sex? Please God, she couldn’t be. She was still a child.

Outside he saw Mike parking his ancient Peugeot 106, low-slung suspension and sporty seats, a relic of someone else’s youth resurrected to serve as a second car. Anna would have the underpowered people-carrier filled with crumbs and socks and ice-cream wrappers. Things were tough for them, he knew. But at least Mike had Anna, her pretty face and her curves and her cynical laugh and her tight budgeting and her no-nonsense way with the children.

Would he swap his life for Mike’s? Would he give up his stable, sterile, two-dimensional existence for the near-bankrupt improvidence of three children and two working parents and the deep familiar peace of a shared bed, animal comfort tempered with the knowledge that the wolves prowled a few feet from the door?

He’d often pictured Anna naked. Not with any intentions, just because she was a reasonably attractive woman who he saw reasonably often and who occasionally figured in his dreams. He could imagine her in bed, making love with that combination of crisp efficiency and unexpected earthiness he associated with nurses. She’d be good at it, he was sure. Skilled and deft and self-assured, knowing what she liked and what she didn’t, willing to speak up, bold and unafraid. It would never happen. He would never want it to happen. But it was a pleasant fantasy to indulge in.

On the street, a woman walked past wearing blue jeans and a white cheesecloth shirt. She looked like the woman from the beach hut, Ava. Outrage stabbed him deep in his belly – how dare they? His daydream about Anna dissolved, leaving him ashamed of the ten minutes he’d spent fantasising about going to bed with his mate’s wife, with his teenage daughter two rooms away.

Would he change his life if he could? Who did he envy most? The man with the loving wife and the surfeit of children, scrabbling every month to pay the bills? Or those cheerful reckless travellers in their illegal encampment? Which would he choose?

“I’d choose you,” he said to the empty air.

He had no pictures of Ellen on the walls, just a thick folder of snapshots that he kept locked away in his cabinet with the rest of his past. He didn’t need photographs. She was with him every day. The life they should have had. The siblings Alicia should have argued with and told to stay out of her room. The dishwasher always overflowing. The endlessly-replenished mountains of washing. The clutter of shoes in the doorway.