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discussions. But all of this is in the future. Right now we need to know who we can count on for what comes afterwards.”
    He watched as Monica crossed the room to the bulky electricity meter by the door, pushed in sixpence, and then turned the key. They both heard the rattle of the coin as it dropped into the metal box, and then the lights flickered to life, but Monica turned them off and took up a seat at the crowded kitchen table and pushed the newspaper out of the way. The early-evening sunset was illuminating the small room, but she knew that this was just a momentary prelude to the gloom that would follow. While her husband was talking, it had finally become clear to Monica that the real problem with the room was that it had been painted an ill-chosen mauve. To further compound the issue, there was nothing on the walls, no pictures, not even an old calendar or a mirror, so tomorrow she would begin the now familiar project of going out to the shops and street markets to see what she might find to liven up the place. Secondhand prints, cheap posters, anything would do, so long as they could be tacked up on the horribly coloured wall and would stay up, then at least they would have something uplifting to look at. Down on the street she could hear the noisy scraping of the tables and chairs being dragged back into the café as the owner prepared to lock up for the night. It was so oppressively hot, and she had already learned that if she kept the single window open, there was noise and soot to contend with, but if she closed in the window the room would soon become stifling. Either way, she couldn’t win.
    *   *   *
    On the first Saturday morning of each month, Julius travelled by tube and then bus to an unsightly part of South London. Moving to the city had made this ghastly journey far easier in practical terms, but for some time now the ordeal of fulfilling his parental obligation to the child from his first marriage had been taxing his dwindling reserves of goodwill and optimism. The eight-year-old girl had been born shortly after he’d arrived in England and made her first appearance during a blizzard-ravaged winter that people seemed keen to continually inform him was “unusual.” The girl was slow, and he feared she might have been affected by English weather, but whenever he raised these concerns with the girl’s mother, she looked angrily at him, which served only to stoke his resentment towards the woman. Until the girl was three, he commuted to university from their South London council flat, but when he finally packed his bags and resolved to leave London and scout for his own place in Oxford, a part of him wanted to miss his daughter. Five years later, however, he still feels uneasy that he has never, not once, been touched by any sense of guilt or loss.
    The child is always neatly presented, as though ready for church, but some kind of skin condition causes her to constantly twitch and scratch, and her glum disposition merely confirms his suspicion that she is in perpetual discomfort. What worries him most, though, is that when she deigns to smile, she does so with an openness that he feels sure some man will exploit before she is too far into her teenage years. For the first hour of each visit the girl’s mother retreats to her bedroom and closes in the door behind her in order to give father and daughter time together. This suits him, for somewhere beneath her swollen face and bloated waistline he can still detect the woman he married, and he has no desire to look at her. Back home he rescued this woman from a life working as a shop assistant in a haberdashery on Liverpool Row that was run by the Lebanese Sahaley brothers. He offered her the choice of forty more years serving customers, with the fresh sea breeze cooling her through the open jalousies, or marriage and a trip to England and a new and exciting beginning. She had waited dutifully for him during the three long years he had dedicated