“Do you think they’ve been yet?” Veronica attempted to sidestep, ignoring George’s edginess. “The noise unit?”

“No idea.”

“Well,” she started carefully, “will you call them?”

George exhaled loudly and turned towards the wall.

“George, don’t be like that. I’m only asking if you’ll call them.” Veronica’s own voice was edged now, fringed with frustration.

“They told me before they only work till four.”

“So what are we meant to do?”

He sat up. “Why are you having a go at me?”

“I’m not. I’m just… exhausted. Can you please just try them again?”

“Why don’t you call them?” George demanded, flapping his hand toward her.

“Because you spoke to them before.”

He didn’t move.

“Why is it so hard to make a phone call?”

Theatrically, George picked up his phone and dialled the number, then with a great show of action, dialled the number again. “Answerphone,” he declared eventually.

She rolled her eyes, and huffed, and found herself wondering in a way that was also new but also increasingly frequent, how she hadn’t seen this aggressive, petulant side of her husband before. He wasn’t loving – he was insensitive, and stubborn, and emotionally stunted. Within the space of the following minute, she shortcut the more and more familiar spiral of internal rumination, and she was on to divorce, and how that might work, and how she would declare it to George, imagining herself empowered and liberated and bold again. Secure in the reliability of impermanence. But then, as always happened, her mind caught a glimpse of it, and the thought of waking up without him flooded from mind to gut, choking her with the dark, suffocating, unbearable notion of his absence.

Lying back in bed this time, George switched off the bedside lights and turned again towards the wall. Veronica did the same. The space between them felt cold and barbed, uncrossed by outstretched palms, not even softened by the smooth cream waffle.

In the darkness, the music continued. And the coarse singing continued. It seeped through the wall onto the clean slate of their bedroom. And then, at 4.48am, from the other side of the wall, a baby started crying, a baby just like the one they longed for, and its wails carried on way past five, and long after the music was finally turned off, and far beyond the time when, Veronica imagined, everybody in Primrose Hill, except for her, and George, and this poor, unheeded baby, were asleep.

Simone

The remnants of Jasmine’s crisps are squashed between the floor and her cheek, though Simone is not sure if the stickiness is from them. She imagines hot, cleansing water rushing over her, washing her clean. But the dirt is caked thick. The grime. It was always the grime that struck her most, at the beginning, seeping into her, clinging to her clothes, as though it knew that this time she was there for good, conjoined, no longer a thing to be brushed off at the end of the day.