There was a greasy armchair by the fire, armchair shrunken inside its loose covers like an old man in a heyday suit. Let me sit in it and never have to get up. I want to rot here, slowly sinking into the faded pattern, invisible against the dead roses. If you could see through the filthy windows you’d see just the back of my head bulging over the line of the chair. You’d see my hair, sparse and thinning, greying, gone. Death’s head in the chair, the rose chair in the stagnant garden. What is the point of movement when movement indicates life and life indicates hope? I have neither life nor hope. Better then to fall in with the crumbling wainscot, to settle with the dust and be drawn up into someone’s nostrils. Daily we breathe the dead.

What are the characteristics of living things? At school, in biology I was told the following: Excretion, growth, irritability, locomotion, nutrition, reproduction and respiration. This does not seem like a very lively list to me. If that’s all there is to being a living thing I may as well be dead. What of that other characteristic prevalent in human living things, the longing to be loved? No, it doesn’t come under the heading Reproduction. I have no desire to reproduce but I still seek out love. Reproduction. Over-polished Queen Anne style dining-room suite reduced to clear. Genuine wood. Is that what I want? The model family, two plus two in an easy home assembly kit. I don’t want a model, I want the full-scale original. I don’t want to reproduce, I want to make something entirely new. Fighting words but the fight’s gone out of me.

I tried to clean up a little. I cut some winter jasmine from the ragged garden and brought it indoors. It looked like a nun in a slum. I bought a hammer and some hardboard and patched up the worst of the neglect. I made it so that I could sit over the fire and not feel the wind at the same time. This was an achievement. Mark Twain built a house for himself with a window over the fireplace so that he could watch the snow falling over the flames. I had a hole that let the rain in, but then I had a life that let the rain in.

A few days after I arrived I heard an uncertain yowling outside. A sound that should have been defiant and swagger-all but that wasn’t quite. I put on my boots, took a flashlight and stumbled through the January slutch. The mud was deep and viscous. To keep a path to my house I had to strew it daily with ashes. The ashes were choked with mud, the gutter ran straight off the house down to my doorstep. Any gust brought the tiles off the roof.

Flat up against the wall of the house, if sweating potbellied brickwork held together with lichen can be called a wall, was a thin mangy cat. It looked at me with eyes composed of hope and fear. It was soaked and shivering. I didn’t hesitate, leant down and took it by the scruff of the neck the way Louise had taken me.