Helen Broadway. I hadn’t seen her for three years but sometimes I dreamed that we were still together and laughing at something, walking somewhere, making love in one of the many ways. I never knew whether to call these good dreams or bad. They left me feeling thinned out and desperate. The antidote was to think of our last fight, over commitment and priorities and how hopeless it had all been. It was a jolt to hear her name being spoken by a stranger. I wrote ‘referred by H. Broadway’ in block capitals on the pad and tried to switch the past off and tune in to the present. ‘Tell me what you told her, Mr Jacobs.’

As a story-teller, Horrie Jacobs was a good miner. He started well back from the work-face with an account of how he met his mate, Oscar Bach. ‘He was a funny bloke, Oscar. I met him on Dudley beach, fishing. I’m a keen beach fisherman, see? Oscar was a new chum but he got the hang of it pretty quick. We caught some bloody huge bream and flathead, me and Oscar. He was a bit impatient, wouldn’t look for the gutter, properly. Couldn’t wait to get his line in. I showed him a few things. He loved catching fish.’

I felt I had to steer things a little. ‘Was he a miner, too?’

‘Oscar? No fear. I tried to take him down the pit once, just to show him how it was. He stepped into the cage and stepped straight out again. Couldn’t face it. No, Oscar had his own business. He was in the pest control game. You know, spraying and laying down poison for cockroaches and that. He was in it in a small way, but he did all right. Just rented a cottage in Dudley, nothing flash. He didn’t like the work much, especially getting under houses, but he was his own boss and he liked that.’

Horrie Jacobs lit another cigarette and gazed in the direction of my single window. As it happened, he was looking north and that was where his thoughts were. ‘We were good mates, me and Oscar, for going on five years. I’d been a bit short of friends ever since I gave up the grog. Miners, you know, they all drink like crazy. When you stop, you lose your mates.’