‘Jack, I can barely hear you.’ Ellen scrambled to her feet. She squeezed in beside Jack – up this close, he smelled like he needed a shower, though she supposed she did too – and leaned out of the window. Alexa and Ben fitted in behind them, so that the four of them were all packed into the window frame. Ellen spotted the pedestrian in question: a woman of indeterminate though possibly fairly advanced age, who was moving at a shuffling pace and dragging a small, neat shopping trolley behind her. She had her back to them and was already walking away from their house.

‘Shit, she’s getting away.’ Ellen took a deep breath and placed her hands on both sides of her mouth in order to amplify her voice and show Jack how it was done. ‘HEY! EXCUSE ME!’

There was a tense pause, in which the woman did not look up but continued to make steady progress down the street.

‘HELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOO?’ Ben shouted, from behind Ellen’s right ear.

She winced. Then she filled her lungs again. ‘EXCUSE ME … MADAM?’

Behind her, she heard Ben suppress a snort.

‘MADAM, CAN YOU HEAR ME?’

Jack’s breath was ragged. The woman was still shuffling. She was definitely getting away, albeit slowly.

Ellen tried one more time. ‘PLEASE?’

‘Give it up,’ Ben said. ‘We’ve lost her.’

‘Maybe she was wearing AirPods,’ Ellen supplied.

‘El, she was like seventy,’ Alexa said, but she sounded amused. She and Ben had stepped away from the window and were now a few paces back, towards the middle of the room.

‘Well, good to see our plan is foolproof,’ Ellen said, ducking into the room herself, Jack at her shoulder. She sat back down on the floor, beside Alexa and Ben. They were entwined once more. Alexa looked very pleased, in spite of this latest setback.

Jack tried to sit down too.

‘Wait, no!’ Alexa raised a hand. ‘Jack, can you please stay by the window a little longer and see if you get the WiFi back?’

‘Oh, of course,’ he spluttered. ‘Sorry. I forgot the plan.’

‘It’s not really a plan,’ Ellen said.

He looked confused.

‘Can you maybe just wave your phone around for a few minutes and see if you get any WiFi, though. Or signal,’ she added. She could feel Ben’s gaze. ‘Please?’

Dutifully, Jack returned to the skylight and stuck his phone at arm’s length out of the window and waved it around. After he’d done this for a few seconds, he brought it back in to look at the screen, tutted exaggeratedly, and stuck it back out again. After observing a few cycles of this, Ellen could no longer bear to watch. She turned to Alexa and Ben and dropped her voice to a whisper.

‘Imagine if he accidentally throws it out of the window.’

8. Jack