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cart, in the rain, while she disappeared into the bushes with her fancy men. Who stole his money and taunted him to come and get it. And who now was trying to steal back a cassava patch their father had left to him in his will.
    A cripple has to develop alternative methods of survival. Over the years, Asaf had learnt to be wily. Of course he was bitter – how could he not be? But he had his wits. Each day, at his stall, he watched people come and go, busy with their day, blessed with their children, people who took it for granted that they could move from one place to another, dance, have sexual intercourse.
    All Asaf had were his mobile phones. They sat there on his table, rows of them, plugged in and silently charging. When they came alive they beeped and twittered and sang. Within them lay the only power he had – the power to settle old feuds, to pay back his tormenters … and to make mischief.
    It was weeks later that Ernestine discovered the truth – that Asaf had lied, that there was no message on her husband’s phone, that the man had simply wanted to take revenge on his sister. Why had he chosen Ernestine and her husband, a respectable, hard-working couple who loved each other? What had they ever done to him?
    She never understood, because she was a woman without vanity. It never crossed her mind that her strong, unadorned beauty had inflamed him, and that he was bitterly jealous of her marriage. For her, beauty was something she sold, rather than possessed herself.
    And soon the whole episode was forgotten. For a few days later Ernestine’s daughter Grace, who had been acting so strangely, drew her mother aside and told her that she was pregnant. The father was a taxi-driver who used to stop at her auntie’s stall to eat her fried fish. He had promised to marry Grace but he was never seen again.
    Poor Grace, so rigid and intransigent … and who, it transpired, didn’t practise what she preached.

Part One

Pimlico, London
    I’LL TELL YOU how the last one ended. I was watching the news and eating supper off a tray. There was an item about a methane explosion, somewhere in Lincolnshire. A barn full of cows had blown up, killing several animals and injuring a stockman. It’s the farting, apparently.
    I missed someone with me to laugh at this. To laugh, and shake our heads about factory farming. To share the bottle of wine I was steadily emptying. I wondered if Alan would ever move in. This was hard to imagine. What did he feel about factory farming? I hadn’t a clue.
    And then, there he was. On the TV screen. A reporter was standing outside the Eurostar terminal, something about an incident in the tunnel. Passengers were milling around behind him. Amongst them was Alan.
    He was with a woman. Just a glimpse and he was gone.
    I’m off to see me bruv down in Somerset. Look after yourself, love, see you Tuesday.
    Just a glimpse but I checked later, on iPlayer. I reran the news and stopped it at that moment. Alan turning towards the woman and mouthing something at her. She was young, needless to say, much younger than me, and wearing a red padded jacket. Chavvy, his sort. Her stilled face, eyebrows raised. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd.
    See you Tuesday and I’ll get that plastering done by the end of the week.
    Don’t fuck the help. For when it ends, and it will, you’ll find yourself staring at a half-plastered wall with wires dangling like entrails and a heap of rubble in the corner. And he nicked my power drill.
    Before him, and the others, I was married. I have two grown-up children but they live in Melbourne and Seattle, as far away as they could go. Of course there’s scar tissue but I miss them with a physical pain of which they are hopefully unaware. Neediness is even more unattractive in the old than in the young. Their father has long since remarried. He has a corporate Japanese wife who thinks I’m a flake. Neurotic, needy,