‘Take off this fucking blindfold,’ he said, shaking his head. Now he had it on he hated it even more.

There was something in the arrogance of his tone that angered me. I sprang towards him and hit him very hard and quickly then with my right hand across the side of the head, enough to send his brain bouncing off the inside of his skull. The force and exhilaration of the violence surprised me; how easy it would have been to carry on. But I stopped there. Not yet. I needed time to think. His nose started to bleed, with some of the blood soaking into the edge of the blindfold, blooming like a poppy across the white material. I saw him freeze. He knew he had miscalculated.

‘Don’t swear at me again,’ I said quietly.

‘Okay,’ he said.

I went to the small sink in the corner and boiled the kettle. Two small cups, a teabag in each one. I put a lot of milk in his so it didn’t scald his mouth, and mixed it nice and strong, mashing the bag against the side of the cup with my spoon until the tea came pulsing out in dark-brown clouds. Then I stirred in a good few of Phyllis’s little pills, with sugar to mask the taste.

I walked back and held the tea to his lips.

‘Tea,’ I said, gently. ‘Have a wee drink. He’ll be here in a minute. I’m having one myself.’

He hesitated for a minute and then started drinking. It was cold in the cellar and the tea was warm and sweet. I watched him gulping sloppily and gratefully, the skin on his jaw shaded with dark bristles, the smell of stale alcohol rising in waves from his pink mouth. A disgrace of a human being – but still, in all his little machinations, a significant piece of work. He was more bearable with the blindfold on. You could conjure him up some humanity.

When he had finished, dribbling the last bit on to his T-shirt, I took the cup away.

‘He’ll be here in a minute,’ I said again.

I sat on a hard chair next to him and drank my own tea.

Then I picked up an old blanket from the corner of the room and put it over him. He didn’t move, except to cough now and then.