So, the next day at lunchtime, I cooked salmon with Kate Winter. It was her day off, a mid-week reward for rostering herself on with the casuals on the preceding Saturday. The store was part of a chain and that was policy for managers, but she said it gave her ‘me time’ during the week, and this Wednesday’s me time was to be her learn-to-cook-salmon lesson.

I showed her how to crush garlic the way I had seen Nigella Lawson do it on TV, and we tossed it into the plastic bag with the salmon, along with some mirin and soy sauce.

‘And that’s pretty much it,’ I told her. ‘You let it marinate for a while, maybe an hour, and the only other things you have to do before frying it are chop the oyster mushrooms and put the rice on.’

‘It can’t be that easy,’ she said. ‘Anyway, there was all that chopping of the garlic. I never seem to get that right, and it takes ages.’ She looked down at the chopping board and the knife. It still had flecks of garlic on it. ‘Chefs on TV chop like machines.’

‘That’s because they have sharp knives and they chop a lot. They also have arthritis in their hands by the time they’re twenty-five. You need a real knife. I think this one’s just bending the garlic.’ I picked it up and tapped its edge against the palm of my hand. It didn’t come close to breaking the skin. ‘The reason you have issues with chopping is that, in some circus somewhere, there’s a sad clown with a tear painted on his cheek because you stole his comedy knife.’

‘Well, that’s a relief. I thought I was just a crap cook. I think I’m the bad carpenter who, by coincidence, also has bad tools.’ She was leaning against the bench with her arms folded, turning her head to look at me and her enemy the knife through a spray of uncontrolled blonde hair. ‘Marinating,’ she said. ‘That takes time. So I should open some wine. I have some expertise there.’ She pushed herself away from the bench and went to the fridge.

‘I’m not sure you’re really connecting with the cooking task.’

‘How would a sauv blanc be? That’s what I’ve got cold.’ She lifted the bottle from a shelf in the fridge door and showed it to me.

‘There’s no way you’re getting out of doing the oyster mushrooms.’

She cracked open the bottle cap and went looking for clean glasses. I sliced one mushroom to demonstrate, then handed her the knife. She chased her first mushroom across the board with the knife edge, then trapped it and cut it.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know it should be thinner.’ Her hands were neat and compact, and made the knife appear large. She had a ring on the fourth finger of her right hand. It looked like it was made of jade.

‘It’s fine. There’s no rule.’ I had the hands of a giant, big ungainly hands in comparison.

She sliced another mushroom, still hesitantly, as if it was working against her and would make her do a bad job.

‘Annaliese misses her dog, you know,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Oscar. You never met Oscar. She went round to your place looking for him. There was a ceremony. We had a wake.’ The photo was still on the fridge, Annaliese with a bug-eyed baby Oscar cupped in her hands. It was fixed squarely in the middle of the freezer door, at eye level. ‘I think you’re some kind of replacement.’ She half-smiled and stopped chopping. ‘It’s really nice of you to get her to record something.’

‘I wouldn’t do it just to be nice. I mean, I am nice – of course I’m nice, I’m a hell of a guy – but I like her voice. And I need to hear the idea I’ve had. I don’t know if that makes me a great replacement for a dog...’

‘I was never a big fan of the dog.’ It came out sounding more weighty than it was probably supposed to, and her cheeks started to go red. She blew stray hair from her face, put down the knife and picked up her wine. ‘How much is Mark charging you for the lawn mowing? I bet he’s overcharging you.’

‘Am I supposed to tell you how much he’s charging me?’

‘Now I know he’s overcharging you.’

‘Well, part of it’s to cover the fuel and the equipment.’

‘And do you think any of that’s coming back to me, the owner of the mower and purchaser of the fuel? Oh, that boy...’ She shook her head, and laughed. She lifted her wine glass up to drink, but then stopped. The ring she was wearing tapped against it. ‘Back at our old place, he used to charge the kids next door to use the trampoline. That’s a pretty embarrassing thing to hear about over the fence.’ She took a sip of the wine, put the glass down.

‘I’m not a big trampoliner myself, so...’ I had no idea what I should be paying Mark to mow my lawn, no idea of the price of a lot of things. I had never had a lawn before.

‘Neither am I. They come with all kinds of safety gear now, and where’s the fun in that? What’s trampolining without those moments of horror when you’re way up in the air looking straight down at the springs?’ She sorted through the punnet of mushrooms, separating some that were clumped together. ‘You’re surprisingly down to earth, you know.’

With that, my job was back in play. I had wanted to be a neighbour with some ideas about salmon. I was okay with being a dog replacement. ‘I’ve never been much for applause,’ I told her, and left it at that.

She gave me a look, as if there would be more, must be more. The end of my sentence drifted out like an ellipsis, and the ellipsis would take all but the most casual listener straight to Derek, who was much for applause, for the grand-scale loveless love of a big crowd out in front of him in the dark. He would make them clap overhead, sing choruses. He would shout ‘Hello Cleveland’ and they would roar. Hello Louisville, goodbye Jess, goodbye.

Kate picked up the knife again and straightened a mushroom out on the board. ‘Is it true that you and Derek don’t get on?’

‘It’s not quite that simple. But nothing ever is, really, is it?’

She pressed the knife down on the mushroom, but the dull blade squished rather than cut it. She had another go, and the mushroom skidded away from her.

‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘No, I guess it’s not.’

‘The problem’s with the knife.’

‘The clown knife, yes. So I should cook with a big red nose on, and crazy oversized boots?’ She tried again, this time with more of a slicing action, and more success. ‘Has the salmon marinated enough yet?’