Then, suddenly, there’s a knock at the door. Robert Gillespie sits in his living room. He should probably open the curtains. It is two in the afternoon after all and looks to be a nice day out there. Instead he rolls himself a cigarette. Ash drops onto the carpet and he grinds it in with his foot. Well, Alex Hargreaves had taken him by surprise. He hadn’t meant to be so quite so hostile but it was a bad start, turning up like that, got him jumpy. No one apart from Robert Gillespie has set foot in the house for the entire time he has lived there. Not even his sister, and technically, she owns the place. To say that the house was a mess would be a considerable understatement. For the first year or so, well, the first six months, maybe, he made an effort, but after a while he began to wonder what the point was. Same with going upstairs to go to bed when there was a perfectly comfortable sofa and sleeping bag right there in the lounge and it only meant heating one room. Fire, TV, laptop, kettle, get all the essentials in one place, that’s the trick.
