She can hear the others downstairs. Janus is still there, too. He just said good-bye to her up in her room and now he’s saying good-bye to her mother in the doorway. Then everything is quiet again, apart from her older brother turning on the shower across the hall. The smell of rissoles has drifted all the way inside her room and she is lying on the bed with a pillow between her knees. She can still feel the moisture of his saliva just beneath her nose, and his fingers. He made an effort to be nice, that was it, and she turns on the TV. She watches what’s left of the local news, then finds a show where some person is looking for someone they knew who has disappeared.

 

Tonight it’s about a son unable to find his father. The son is thirty, rather chubby, and keeps crying all the time while he says he is not angry with his father. But he can’t understand why his father has not written to him. When the girl whose show it is asks if he’s sad about that, the son can only nod.