Here’s a routine: Sunday night was Phyllis’s bingo night with her friend Julie. Off she went, lipstick on, wee bag zipped and clamped to her side, bit of excitement sure, wouldn’t miss it for the world. From a distance, I watched her leave. I wore a baseball hat tugged low over my eyes, glasses, and the stick-on moustache, with cotton wool jammed in the pouches of my cheeks. I sported a little pot belly from a small cushion I had taped around my middle. I moved differently, slouchily, as though my stomach was already pushing forward in expectation of its next can of lager. I carried the rest of my kit in the backpack, along with a packet of cooked cocktail sausages I’d bought in Marks & Spencer downtown.

I slipped into the house with my old key, looking quickly around to see if anyone was watching, and shut the door sharply behind me. For a second I stood against it and closed my eyes, breathing in the sweetish, wood-polish smell of the house. It was my house – all those years here with Big Jacky – and yet it didn’t feel like mine any more. You go away even for a short time and things shift irrevocably. I had become a burglar, nervily tiptoeing around the furniture of my own life.

I took it all in: the flaking paint, the sideboards suddenly full of knick-knacks – she’d got them all out of the cupboard and put them on parade. She’d got rid of the sofa without even asking, the forgiving old sagger with the wooden frame where Big Jacky and I had been so happy, and replaced it with something squashy, floral and horrible from one of the sofa shops in town. I felt a surge of fury. As I turned to see what else she had done, the corner of my jacket caught one of the ornaments – a grey, glazed pigeon – and it crashed to the floor, shattering with surprising force and scattering little fragments across the room.

I found a dustpan and brush under the sink, swept up the pieces and put them in one of the plastic bags Phyllis kept compressed in a drawer. The handle of the pan felt sticky in my hand. I was beginning to feel overheated and tense. No point looking for a bin outside now. I went up to my old bedroom, and shoved the broken pieces far back under the single bed, into a light grey snowdrift of undisturbed dust. She wouldn’t come across them there for a while.