He moved in with his ex and her father quite a while ago. Lost count of the number of days he’s been living on the worn couch in her living room. Sitting and eating and sleeping. It feels more like a prison sentence now than it did when he first arrived. This is no longer a temporary measure. With his nails he’s tallying the days into her pliant spongy wallpaper. Four vertical fingernail indents, one diagonal. Immortalisation of each identical day began when she brought home the first guy. He can’t think how long he’d already been around before she gave up on his silent immovable presence chewing up her living space.

The first guy a blueprint for the rest. Mangy, dreadlocked, pierced. Awkwardly tall in a large leather jacket flapping like loose skin around knees and bony shoulders. She leaves them waiting for long painful hours at her patio doors in fine drizzle with dull cloudy veils shutting out the moon. From his couch he has a perfect view of each new bat flapping eagerly at the glass.

Almost every day she leaves him alone in the house with her father. Do something, she scrawls onto the glass doors with her red lipstick, the same red every wine glass and coffee mug in the kitchen wears on its rim. Like a dog pissing against a tree, he thinks bitterly. He does nothing, he undoes signing up for the army, which he did before he moved in there. He doesn’t turn up, there is no-one not to know where he is now. The day he was expected to register in his starched dull green regalia, he chews his lips to a bloody pulp on her couch.

She sits behind me dressed in kohl and battered size four Docs, as far away from her couch and her father and her ex as possible. He does nothing, she whispers into her phone. I refuse to listen, fingers pressing into ears. When I turn back, she is staring at me, fat grey tears smudging down her cheeks.