He hoped he was nice to Lissa. It would be cool there tonight. Bright as well, you wouldn’t get a whiff of sunset till ten P.M. There’d be a breeze probably; the right kind of evening for just a shirt and a jumper and being totally comfortable wherever you were, with fresh air and the sweet smell of the last of the bluebells on the air, as well as the gorse, warmed by the sun through the day . . . he could almost feel it. And smell the candy floss on the air, and feel you couldn’t be happier . . .

“So, anyway, we drained about a liter of bile from his abdomen,” Yazzie was saying.

Cormac blinked. “Is that right?” he said.

She looked worried. “Sorry, is that gross? Before dinner?”

“Naw, naw, not at all,” said Cormac.

In fact, it wasn’t before dinner at all. Lissa had been right, they’d had to queue; what she hadn’t been correct about was it certainly wasn’t an hour. It was at least ninety minutes.

Something happened in the queue. Looking around, Cormac could see most people on their phones; some had been left to hold places while their presumably more popular mates whooped it up in a local bar somewhere. Some couples were tight in conversation, as if they were as happy to be in a queue together as they would be anywhere else, and some groups of friends were doing that slightly nervous loud thing groups do at the beginning of a night out, before they’ve all managed to have a drink and settle down. They were whooping at each other and shouting performatively and welcoming more and more members to their group, until Cormac started to doubt whether they were ever going to make it to the front of the queue.

“What do they sell here?” he said, realizing that both of them were actually finding the conversation a little slow and stilted; that even before they knew each other, they kind of looked like one of those couples with absolutely nothing to say to each other, once she’d told him about old Mr. Haber’s drained cyst.

“Buns,” said Yazzie, pointing to the menu in the window.

“Buns?” Cormac screwed up his face. He didn’t want a bun; he was starving.

“Bao,” said Yazzie. “They’re like Chinese street food. They’re filled with meat and stuff.”

“Meat buns,” said Cormac. They had already been there for forty-five minutes. His shirt was sticking to his back and his neck felt grimy, simply from standing on a narrow sidewalk with cabs and trucks squeezing past him every second.