An important part of my leaving-Bob daydream was the place I would live in without him – an uncluttered white space full of nothing but me. And perhaps a coffee table. And a bowl of perfect green apples. Joni Mitchell on the stereo. A white rug.

For all of this time I had been expecting Bob to change, change into somebody more energetic, more interesting – into someone else, in fact. It had dawned on me, only very slowly, that this was never going to happen. In the beginning I had liked Bob because he was Bob (although heaven knows why); now I was beginning to dislike him for the same reason. I was living with someone whose hobby was playing air guitar and who sincerely thought he was going to be a Time Lord when he grew up.

‘Hey,’ Bob said when he saw me. He was wearing a tank-top knitted by his mother for the larger version of Bob that she kindly held in her mind’s eye, and straight jeans which I had turned into massive flares for him by inserting pieces of old flannelette sheeting the colour of Germolene.

He was sprawled on the floor, watching the innocent little girl on the test card with a touching devotion. The rays from television sets were vital to Bob’s continued existence on this planet, in the way that oxygen is for other people. He claimed that the three-day week was having an adverse effect on his metabolism. Bob had bought his small black-and-white portable set with the proceeds from his one and only summer job – counting trees in Camperdown for the parks department. Bob didn’t actually count the trees individually but looked at ‘a whole bunch’ of them and calculated how many there were, as in, ‘That looks like about twenty trees.’ As you can imagine, he usually got it completely wrong.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Bob asked.

‘With you, don’t you remember?’

‘No.’ Bob was eating the remains of a two-day-old biryani from the Lahore on the Perth Road. The chicken in the biryani bore a worrying anatomical resemblance to cat. Bob’s idea of a balanced diet left something to be desired. When I first met him he lived off fish suppers from The Deep Sea, the occasional tin of dog food (‘Why not?’) and jars of cold baby food, the latter a particularly sensible way of eating in Bob’s opinion – no cooking, no washing-up, no thought at all beyond whether to have ‘Lamb and Vegetables’ or ‘Pears and Custard’. Or both. It was wasted on babies, Bob said, and his only complaint was that Heinz didn’t do fish and chips in toddler-sized jars.

I spent some time weaning him onto more regular student meals – sausage and chips, egg and beans, mince and anything and fish pie – the latter a concept that Bob found particularly bizarre for some reason and he kept repeating, ‘Wow, fish pie,’ until I had to ask him to stop. I took him shopping in Betty White’s on the High Street once and he couldn’t get over the idea that a shop could sell both fish and vegetables – ‘That’s not . . . natural,’ he said. Although not as unnatural, in Bob’s opinion, as fish farms.

‘Somebody just phoned for you,’ he said, spilling grains of cold yellow rice onto the carpet.

‘Who?’

‘Dunno. Some woman.’

‘My mother?’

‘Don’t think so.’

Of course not, what was I thinking, Nora didn’t have a phone. Nora didn’t even have electricity.

‘She sounded . . . weird,’ Bob said.

‘Weird? You mean weird accent?’

‘Quite correct, Captain.’

No-one ever phoned me. The only reason we had a phone was because it was paid for by Bob’s father and mother – Bob Senior and Sylvia – so that Sylvia could remind Bob to have a wash occasionally and not eat Angel Delight at breakfast.

Although you would never think it to look at him, Bob had a more than adequate family back in Essex, a fact that he usually denied because they were such models of suburban decorum. I found Bob’s family – Bob Senior, his mother Sylvia and his sister Cherry and a buxom black Labrador called Sadie – strangely charismatic; they lived the kind of banal, tediously quotidian lives that I’d always longed for – eating roast chicken, changing sheets, going for boring Sunday outings in the family car, treading on fitted wool carpets, taking holidays in Spain, entertaining from a full drinks cabinet. For me, they were the most attractive thing about Bob.

We spent nearly every vacation with them in the pleasantly anodyne atmosphere of their house in Ilford, so much more normal than Nora’s wrack and insular home. Bob, on these visits, was his usual self, sleeping most of the day and then hanging around all evening, waiting for his parents to go to bed so that he could skin up a joint and watch Come Dancing.

Bob slept in his boyhood room, which, despite Sylvia’s best cleaning efforts, had never been purged of the smell of the teenage Bob – a heady perfume of sweaty socks and unwashed foreskins, of night emissions and illicit lager. It was decorated with football-themed wallpaper and still contained his old Dinky cars and the grotesquely misshapen soft toys that Sylvia had lovingly knitted for him.

I was always sequestered in the guest room, to prevent any ‘shenanigans’ – as Bob Senior put it – taking place. (‘As if,’ Bob Junior said.) The guest room provided an antiseptic yet pleasant environment, with its decor of overblown wallpaper roses, the rag rug on the floor, the clean magnolia paintwork and the flimsy flowered curtain that let in the orange glow of sodium street lights. I spent long hours in there, reading my way through the miscellany of guest-room reading matter (old National Geographics, dog-eared Agatha Christies, Reader’s Digests) and listening to the sounds of a well-ordered house. I couldn’t help thinking how much better off I would have been as a child with Sylvia as my mother – in fact, I would have been a different person altogether. Instead, I had been subjected in my formative years to Nora’s sloppy habits and laissez-faire philosophies (‘Well, don’t go to school if you don’t want to.’)

~ I was teaching you free will, Nora says grumpily.

It was surprising I got an education at all, scraping through seaside secondary schools – Whitley Bay being the last town in our coastal odyssey. Only after Nora had waved me off on the train from Newcastle did she leave her job in a dingy hotel and set off back to the land of her birth and to the Stuart-Murrays’ holiday home.

‘And what did this mysterious woman say?’ I asked Bob.

He shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘Well, she must have said something. You can’t say nothing.’

‘She said,’ Bob said, with theatrical patience, ‘“is there someone called Euphemia there?”’

‘And you said?’

‘No, of course.’

Bob was amazed when I explained to him that ‘Effie’ was short for Euphemia (‘You know, Bob – Robert?’) and seemed rather put out that I hadn’t taken the time to clarify this before. Of course, this was the person who for the first few weeks of our relationship thought I was called ‘F.E.’ like some kind of college or an abbreviated swear word.

No-one ever called me Euphemia, no-one ever had. Who could know me by that name? Who other than someone calling from the obliterated past? Nora’s memory was like history itself – partial, fallible, inclined to oblivion – but surely there were other people somewhere who remembered – a best friend, a cousin, a schoolteacher.

The doorbell rang. It was Shug, who mooched into the flat and settled down on the sofa, burying himself in a Spiderman comic.

‘Can’t stay long,’ he said, ‘things to do, people to see.’

‘Yeah, well I have to go to the bog,’ Bob said as if this was a meaningful rejoinder.

Shug, unlike Bob, always had things to do and people to see. He spent his life disappearing off on mysterious trips and errands – off to Whitfield to see ‘the man’, out to the country to ‘get his head straight’ (which usually resulted in the exact opposite happening) or down south to some festival or other. Or at least that’s what he said – I had once spotted Shug in town, dressed (bizarrely) in a Territorial Army uniform, and on another occasion I had seen him pushing a toddler on the swings in Magdalen Yard Green. Perhaps he was leading a double life – perhaps I should warn Andrea before she found herself committing bigamy. On the other hand, it would give her something to write about.

‘I’ve got an essay to do,’ I said and took myself off to the bedroom because it was obvious I wasn’t going to get any peace if I stayed with Bob and Shug.

The bedroom was an icebox and I had to wear gloves, which made typing rather laborious. I worked on an ancient little Underwood that had a misaligned ‘t’ which made everything I wrote seem perpetually jaunty and surprised, which was rarely the way it was. I had a deadline, so to speak. Martha wanted the first draft of The Hand of Fate by the coming Friday, ‘or else’. I typed one-fingered and with difficulty.

Madame Astarti’s stall was in a prime position, between the fish stall and the bomb. The bomb was a Second World War torpedo set in concrete and bore a plaque remembering the men of Saltsea who died in the war. It was deactivated, of course, but just occasionally as Madame Astarti sat in her booth a few feet away from its hulking metal she did wonder – how did you know for sure if it was dead? If it had gone dead.

‘Hear about the body?’ Frank asked cheerfully.

Lou Rigatoni was the nearest thing Saltsea had to the Mafia, which wasn’t very near, it was true, but near enough for most people. The Rigatonis had begun the ice-cream empire (‘The Best Scoop in the North!’) which now dominated the north-east stretch of coastline (or ‘The Yorkshire Riviera’ as Vic Leggat, the leader of the local council, would have it known) and had now expanded to include amusement arcades and fish and chip shops and anything that could turn a profit.

‘Heard the news?’ Lou Rigatoni asked. ‘They’ve found a body in the sea, some woman.’ He was lingering in a way that was making Madame Astarti nervous.

‘Yes, well, must be getting on,’ she said, fiddling with the padlock on her booth; ‘things to do, people to see – you know how it is.’

‘Yes indeed,’ Lou Rigatoni laughed, ‘I myself have to see a man about a dog.’ And with that he doffed his hat again and was gone.

‘Poor dog,’ thought Madame Astarti.

‘You hadn’t forgotten, had you?’ she said.

‘No,’ I sighed, ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’ Although I had, of course.