‘Right.’ Ben looked downcast. ‘Your street does seem pretty empty.’ He lay down on the floor under the skylight, his belly in the shaft of sunshine. He reminded Ellen of a slightly feral cat. ‘What time is it?’ he asked from the floor.

‘Eight thirty-seven,’ Jack said, dutifully.

‘Pretty early for a Saturday, I guess.’ Ben sat up and started shuffling towards them on his bottom, holding his jeans with one hand while keeping his balance with the other arm. When he reached the circle, he shuffled into place next to Alexa. She tucked her hair behind her ears and shot him a shy sideways glance. ‘Maybe we should try again in half an hour or so?’ he suggested.

‘Yeah,’ Alexa said, quietly. ‘Maybe we give it thirty minutes and then we try again.’

Ellen contemplated this. She suspected that if she were walking down a street on which a shirtless man was hollering from an attic skylight, she would put her head down and speed up. Not to mention the fact that she had never met a single one of her neighbours. Unless you counted the house diagonally opposite, full of mangy Goldsmiths students whom she had met only once, on the Tuesday evening they’d thrown a colossal, foundation-shaking house party and she’d begged them to turn down the bass. They’d laughed and, she suspected, turned the volume up.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ Ellen echoed, finally, without much enthusiasm. ‘I mean, what else are we going to do?’ She could feel the breeze from the open skylight. ‘I really need the loo,’ she moaned, realizing suddenly how true it was.

‘God, I feel like hell,’ Ben replied. ‘I did not need that Negroni nightcap.’

‘No,’ Alexa said, ruefully. ‘I’m definitely feeling it now.’ She gave Ben a conspiratorial half-grin.

Ellen looked at her friend with a little surprise. She wondered, for the first time, how Alexa and Ben had ended up together. She was about to make a rather impertinent enquiry, but Jack spoke instead.

‘It’s weird how the door handle just fell out,’ he observed, with the air of someone pointing out that it had started to drizzle but looked like it might stop soon. He had shuffled towards the door and was poking his fingers through the hole where the handle used to be.

‘Yep,’ Alexa agreed. ‘That was certainly unexpected.’

‘Do you ever use this place?’ Ben asked.

‘No, I think I’ve only been up here once, when the electrics fused,’ Alexa replied, quietly.

‘I mean it’s packed to the rafters with our landlord’s old shit,’ Ellen said, bluntly. ‘So no, we don’t tend to curl up here and watch a film together.’

Hurt flashed across Ben’s face but he rearranged his expression quickly. ‘Right.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘Fair point.’