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flaking mustard-colored front door, and the smell of questionable fried poultry accompanied him up the narrow gray stairs.
    On the first-floor landing, he was pounced on by Mrs. Dollis, his neighbor, a tiny, aggressive elderly lady with a startling selection of random teeth, as if her gums had been pebble-dashed. She bobbed her head suddenly out from her doorway, turning the first-floor landing into Stephen’s own personal ghost train.
    “Foxes have been at the bins again,” she grumbled.
    “Have they, Mrs. Dollis?”
    “There’s chicken skin all over the floor. ’S disgusting.”
    “Well, isn’t that the shop’s responsibility?”
    “It’s not mine, that’s for sure.”
    “I’ll sort it in the morning, Mrs. Dollis, okay?”
    She groaned at this, as if Stephen had somehow been engaged in a secret program training foxes to get at the bins, then disappeared, and Stephen continued up the stairs to his flat. He double-locked the door, and lowered the aging blinds, slightly too small for the window, against the sodium glare of the streetlights outside.
    There were two furnished rooms. The first, the aforementioned bedsitting room, was just about large enough to swing a cat in, and it was fair to say that there had been times when, had a cat been to hand, Stephen would almost certainly have swung it. Without much expectation, he pressed the button on the answering machine, an aging flesh-colored model with a special in-built “gloat” feature. In a strange, sardonic intonation it informed him, “You [obviously] have [only]
ONE
new message.”
    He pressed PLAY .
    “Hello, Dad. It’s Sophie here…”
    Stephen grinned. “Hey, hiya, Sophs,” he said to himself, in a sentimental, slightly dopey voice that would have embarrassed Sophie had she been there to hear it. She continued, in her formal phone voice, like a junior speaking clock.
    “This is just to say that I am very much looking forward to seeing you next week, and…and that’s all, really. Mum is here. She wants a word…”
    A word. Stephen frowned, and instinctively stepped back a little from the answering machine. There was a rustle, as the phone changed hands, then his ex-wife came on, speaking low with her soft Yorkshire accent.
    “Hello, there. Obviously you’re onstage at the moment, giving your all, then it’ll be back to Dame Judi Dench’s gaff for a game of Pictionary and some songs from the shows or something, but don’t forget—Monday. Hope you’ve got something nice planned this time, not just the movies again.” Then, in a lower voice, “And just so you’re prewarned, Colin’s taken half-term off, so he may well be here as well…”
    Stephen bared his teeth, waved his fist at the answering machine.
    “…so no fighting, verbal or otherwise. Try and be
nice
to each other. For Sophie’s sake. Please?”
    Stephen pressed DELETE with a little more venom than absolutely necessary, then continued wrinkling his nose, baring his teeth, kicking things, but not too hard, as he went next door to the kitchenette, with its emphasis on “-ette.” Here a small Formica table fought for lino space with a sink unit, a water heater that roared like a jet engine and a homicidal gas cooker. Despite Stephen’s constant endeavor to keep the place clean and fresh, this room had a strange fermenting smell, like the inside of a child’s lunch box. The origins of the smell remained obscure—there was no fridge at present, the last fridge having recently committed suicide, or perhaps been murdered by the oven. In the meantime, he managed by keeping milk for tea on the window ledge, which would do fine for now. The studio was not really designed for large-scale entertaining; it was designed for solitary drinking, consuming fast food and weeping.
    Still baring his teeth at no one, he went into the bathroom or, more accurately, the “shower room,” where a toilet, a washbasin and a temperamental shower unit were so close together that it would be