Sometimes he worried about making remarks that could be misinterpreted, and that made conversation even more impossible. In fact, she thought he was a frustrated queer: Amy had revealed this in her final letter to him. The nuclear counter-strike – the retaliatory letter that reduced their idiotic relationship to smoking, radioactive ash.

Not an email: a letter, which he nearly hadn’t read.

He had skimmed it, in case there was anything he had to deal with – anything financial, or possibly a threat of vengeance. Her brother had threatened to break his jaw, which seemed so specific. If Amy wanted to humiliate him in the street – and if she committed that hope to paper – he should at least make himself aware of it, so he tried to skim the letter, but ended up reading it properly. It was only two sides, and the sheets of paper were small. She had distilled her rage and humiliation – those were two of the words she used – and composed two-dozen cruel sentences designed to cut deep. One of them was about Charlie, and how overjoyed she’d been that Michael and her mother were no more. She had kissed Amy, and hugged her. She always thought you were a frustrated queer using me to pretend otherwise because it’s so clearly what you can’t or don’t want to deal with.

The words had lodged themselves in his insides, like shrapnel. They continued to scrape and stab, even when he was still.

‘You’ve got to let someone love you,’ she’d said, when the relationship began.

And what was the other cliché, so horrible it had made him sweat? ‘You’ve got to start liking yourself. You’ve got to learn to like yourself. Stop giving yourself a hard time, stop “beating yourself up”!’ That kind of wisdom usually bloomed out of her mouth after a large glass of wine, and he would nod sagely and say something appropriate back.

‘You can talk!’ That was one of his pearls. ‘You can talk, love.’

Love.

‘We have to be kinder to ourselves, and each other.’

‘We have to learn to forgive ourselves. To start again, because – you know what?’

‘Tomorrow—’

‘Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life. We have to laugh at ourselves a bit more, and take things as they come. Go on – laugh at yourself.’

Michael looked out of the window, and smiled. He smiled and laughed, laughing at himself. He was a clown, gulping neat malt whisky.

‘But we did like each other, a little bit,’ he said – and realised that once again, he’d spoken aloud.

‘That wasn’t enough,’ he said softly, to the glass. ‘Liking each other, I mean. It wasn’t enough to justify. It wasn’t going to get either of us through – was it?’

‘You have to work at it,’ Amy said.