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For dinner, Jessica had Turkey Twizzlers, potato croquettes, and garden peas, followed by tinned peaches and squirty cream, with a cup of Earl Grey to wash it all down. Just like the English. Then she went outside to sit on the bench and wait for her show to begin – the first episode of the new season.

There was a narrow stretch of grass behind Jessica’s house that marked the boundary between residential and business. The realtors called it a park if ever they were trying to sell property in this area, but it wasn’t really a park. It was just one of those strange green spaces nobody’d ever got around to building on. Not even the studios.

Much of the land in this part of town belonged to the studios. That show about the paranoid schizophrenic detective? They filmed that just two blocks over. The sitcom with the two lesbians and their teenage superspy son? Those guys were always closing off the streets out here for their location work, usually at the most inconvenient times possible. Arnold used to kick up an absolute storm when they wouldn’t let him cross to the drugstore and he had to walk all the way round just to get new batteries for his hearing aid. And then there was Mercy Street. Arnold and Jessica had been following that show for two years before they found out where it was actually shot – just down the bottom of the realtors’ park. From Jessica’s bench, she’d often seen the actors sneaking out the gate down the bottom of the alley to head up into town, or burning down a cigarette together in the lot past the fence. It wasn’t till she overheard a bunch of out-of-town autograph hunters saying how this was the set for Mercy Street that she finally caught on who those actors might be. Her eyesight had been growing steadily worse these last few years and it wasn’t like on TV where their faces were right up in front of you. From a distance now, they all looked the same.

Later in the evening when the sun got round this side of the house, Jessica liked to sit in the shade of that random old beech tree and set her mind to wandering. She’d never been one for sun worshipping, and neither was her husband. That was one of the few things they had in common, towards the end.

Another was Mercy Street. It was the only show they both watched, the only one they watched together, even though Arnold watched it in the den and Jessica the kitchen, or sometimes the bedroom, the quilt wrapped snug round her knees. She’d given up trying to watch it in the same room as her husband; that was just all too frustrating. For a start Arnold always had the TV turned up so loud you could hear it halfway down the street (Jessica could mute the one in the kitchen and still follow the dialogue), but then he also had to have the subtitles on too, otherwise he claimed he couldn’t make out one word of what that Indian doctor was saying. Jessica thought that was just nonsense. Doctor Tesh had a lovely speaking voice, better than anyone else on the show. Besides, his accent was English, not Indian – as clean and proper as Laurence Olivier or Roger Moore. Arnold just didn’t like the Indians, not since he’d been stationed out there in the 50’s and had come back with a case of the squits that lasted him the entire summer.

On top of all that was the way he always had to shout at the TV.

“Garbage!”

“Go on – lay one on him! Put out his lights!”

“Leave that loopy bitch! Divorce her!”

“Are you a man or what? Are you a man?”

There was no getting round it: Jessica’s husband had turned into one of those crazy old coots who used to sit up in the box seats on The Muppet Show and holler comments down at the stage. He cleared his throat more than any other human being alive, sometimes in stretches that went on longer than the shows on TV, and he’d become obsessed with his poop. How often he went, how long it took, the size and shape and colour and consistency of it, how there was nothing felt quite so fine to a man his age as a really good evacuation. It was funny the things you missed when someone was gone.

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