She stood still for a moment. When he didn’t get up from the flagged floor she ran to him as fast as she could, dragged and pulled at him until he was upright again, coughing and emptying himself of the blood and yellow stuff he had to get rid of. The whole scene was actually a rerun of something that had really happened, but it was her mum who had been crying and screaming until some of the ward orderlies turned up to take Dad away. The dream recurred every time she fell asleep last night and she had never dreamt it before.

Lydia sighed deeply and shifted position a little. She had to sit further out on the edge of the bed to part her thighs just as widely and slowly as the man in front of her demanded.

He was sitting about a metre away. A middle-aged man, in his forties, the age her father would have been now.

He was her third customer today.

He had come to see her punctually every Monday morning for nearly a year. He always knocked on the door just as the church bells started pealing outside her locked window.

He didn’t spit. He didn’t want to force himself inside her. She didn’t have to do anything with his sexual organ. She didn’t even know what he smelt like.

He was one of those who hugged her when she opened the door, but then didn’t touch her again. All he wanted was to sit with his cock in one hand and wave at her with the other to get undressed and do other things.

He wanted her to thrust her crotch backwards and forwards while he squeezed his cock harder and harder. He wanted her to bark like a dog he once had. In the meantime, he kept squeezing his dick, which would go more and more pink until he fell back into the armchair and let his stuff flow over the black leatherette.

By twenty past nine he was done. When the bells rang out for half past he would be gone. Lydia stayed where she was, sitting on the edge of the bed and listening to the birdsong. She could hear it again.