Anxious to discard my insanitary tunic, I stepped quickly across my outer room. There I had a table where I ate, wrote, or thought about the filthiness of life, plus a bench, three stools, and a cooking oven I built myself. In the bedroom stood my lopsided bed, alongside a spare couch, a storage chest which doubled as a washstand, and a perch for when I forced myself to patch the leaky roof.

Stripping off with relief, I used the last water in a pitcher for another good scrub down, then found a tunic that had only torn in two new places since the last time my mother mended it. I combed my hair roughly, rolled up my second-best toga in case I went anywhere respectable later, then pounded downstairs.

While I was delivering my castoffs I heard myself hailed raucously by Lenia, the laundress.

'Falco! Smaractus wants your rent!'

'What a surprise! Tell him we can't all get what we want in life…'

I found her in the corner she used as an accounting room, sitting in her greasy slippers while she supped mint tea. Until this pitiful ninny decided to invest in real estate (and real misery) by planning to marry our landlord Smaractus, she had been one of my shabby friends; once I could persuade her to ditch the brute she would be again. Lenia was a sagging drab about five times stronger than she looked, with startling snaggles of henna-red hair which constantly worked free of a limp scarf round her head; she had to poke the strands back in to peer ahead safely when she wanted to go anywhere.

'He means it, Falco!' She had sickly eyes and a voice like forty dried peas rattling in a pannikin.