I felt too shy to introduce myself and gazed out of the window. Opposite, above a mini-cab office, there was a poster for some clothing company—a model wearing ripped jeans. What an insane world, I thought. Ragged children, on the other side of the planet, toiled in factories to make jeans that were purposely torn into rags for well-off Western kids to buy as a fashion statement. I wanted to share this no-doubt cliched observation and suddenly felt bleak.

Loneliness, I realised, was making me increasingly strange. As I rattled round in my empty house, I was dwindling into something not quite human. The social constraints were lifted. I farted in bed, just as Azra had suggested, and didn’t wash enough. The hairs had grown on my legs. I wasn’t talking to myself, not yet, but I’d realised the civilising effect of another human being, simply by their presence in the house. And they would restore my sense of time, surely they would. In recent months I’d have a drink, make supper, eat it, wash up, get ready for bed, then look at my watch and realise it was only half-past eight.

Maybe a lodger would give me back my evenings, simply by being there. Even if we didn’t have much in common.

Azra finished her phone call and came over. She was perspiring in that jacket. It was an inappropriate outfit for a food run, even for her, and I wondered if she was meeting someone later.

I asked: ‘Is there anyone here who needs a room? Any of these people? Is there a list or something? I don’t know how to go about it.’

‘We can’t do that now,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go. Thing is, I’m going in the opposite direction, but I can drop you off at the tube.’

And she hustled me out.

Azra’s acting career had been short-lived. A brief appearance in Casualty, avant-garde stuff in pub theatres, that sort of thing. I remember how Greg and I would trek out to godforsaken venues in Zone 3 and sit on benches watching Eastern European productions in a state of buttock-numbing bafflement. She never made the big time. The trouble was, Azra was not beautiful enough for leading roles—too tall and angular, with her big features and tombstone teeth. More to the point, she wasn’t a company player, one of the gang. Actors survive on charm as well as talent and she gained a reputation for being difficult, especially with directors, and especially if they were men.

So her career petered out and she went on to other things. But she was born with a talent for fabrication and reinvention; her very accent, that middle-class drawl, had been created somewhere between Sunderland and London. Greg once said, ‘There’s something phoney about her, don’t you find? Something not quite real.’ But then Greg had never trusted her.

But I did. I trusted her with my life.

I never did get a Syrian lodger. I’d hoped to do the food run again the following Saturday, and planned to investigate further then. The community hub seemed to be run by an amiable beardie who’d been nailing up notices when I was there. He might be the person to ask.