But he had to put a stop to it. Kirsty buried her head beneath the pillow while he dressed hurriedly, pulling on his jeans and a T-shirt without bothering with his underwear. He went outside and ran down the steps. It was freezing and, apart from the music coming from the basement flat, utterly silent.

He banged on the door and on the window pane. Unsurprisingly, there was no answer. He lifted the letterbox and shouted through it, ‘I’m going to call the police.’ But he knew he wouldn’t. He would be too embarrassed. The music scares me, officer. How pathetic did he want to look? He went back upstairs and got back in bed, and at that very moment the music stopped. He lay absolutely still, dreading that it might start up again. Eventually, he tried to get back to sleep. But he was too angry; his heart was beating too fast. And it would be time to get up in a couple of hours anyway. So he got out of bed again and plugged the Playstation in. He played Call of Duty, imagining that every enemy soldier he mowed down was Lucy or Chris. Kirsty got up too and sat beside him, watching. She barely spoke.

Weeks had gone by since the spider incident. For the first week, Kirsty had made Jamie check the bed before he got in it; the bath before she would turn the taps on; the front room before she would enter it. She was convinced that it was going to happen again: another spider invasion. But when it didn’t, she relaxed, and then crossed to a state beyond relaxed. She took on an air of calmness and serenity. She walked around with her hands on her belly a lot, even though she was far from showing. She bought parenthood magazines and looked up baby sites on the internet. She was imagining herself in a perfect future, a future in which she would have her child and everything would be alright. She seemed to forget all about the problems with Lucy and Chris. She stopped mentioning the spiders, although one evening a spider made an appearance on television and she shouted at Jamie to change the channel. Quickly. Quickly.

Now she sat beside Jamie and watched him exorcise his anger and frustration. At six thirty, as the sun struggled to lighten the sky, she went off to the bathroom to be sick. Morning sickness had arrived with a vengeance. And then they went to work.