Unable to settle back to sleep, I got up, sat on the toilet and squinted through the blinds at the brick facades of the houses in the estate behind us. Their rooftops were slick with rain, newly planted cherry trees precarious in the wind, the pavements below lit up by the smudgy glow of street lamps. There was a light on in the kitchen of the end house, as there often was in the night. A blurred figure in a pink dressing gown was moving about – another lonely insomniac. A siren sounded from somewhere and I thought about death, sleepily stunned by its inevitability. Joy said she’d been planning to tell me anyway. She’d been offered ‘an amazing opportunity to care for two small children in a wonderfully creative family’. ‘I’ll miss that little girl,’ was the last thing she said as she left, ‘Addie fed my heart.’ And Addie missed Joy. She called her every day on her Peppa Pig plastic phone, told her all her news. One morning I found her peering into the toilet bowl, examining her produce.
