There were times when I thought there wasn’t much point to the life I had. I sat up in my room and looked at the squares of grey city sky through the dilapidated window frame. I missed Phyllis, for all her ways. I missed Titch and his mother. I missed my father most of all, and I thought sometimes that, now he was dead, there was no one in the world who my own death would really matter to, beyond casually saying, ‘Oh isn’t it terrible what’s happened to poor Jacky,’ no one who might lie awake night after night and ache for how big the darkness was without me.

That’s how we measure out our own reality, through the pain that the absence of us will cause in others. That’s what roots us and gives us substance. Without it we’re just ghosts passing through a series of doors, river water running into the ocean and leaving no trace.

When she wasn’t at the restaurant for a couple of days, I even found myself missing Eve. It felt good to miss someone I could see again.

16

It was getting colder. The leaves had rusted and fallen from the trees, leaving them spiky and shivering in the breeze. The days were shorter, guillotined by early darkness. I went up to Oxford Street and bought myself a heavy coat made from dark, thick tweed: it weighed me down and lent me substance against the wind. But London was choking me: the clotting of people, the taste of fuel in the air, the relentless voice in the Tube station that never tired of telling me, day after day, to Mind the Gap and Let the Passengers off the Train First.

Eve and I were friendlier now. We would sometimes share a cigarette out at the back of the restaurant, leaning against the wall beside the bins. I told her all about the Whartons, and she told me about Raymond, and her mother who drove her mad.