She had just returned from her year abroad, in Paris, as part of her degree, and was back for good this time – or until she could find a way out. The last time she’d been home was an overnight return to London for her mother’s funeral, earlier in the year. In Paris, she could almost forget that she was gone, but here in London the memory followed her so that it felt safer to keep still.

‘Please, Saoirse, I just don’t fancy it. Take someone else, yeah?’ she had protested but Saoirse wouldn’t back down.

‘It’s been four months – you have to come out sometime.’

Gabriela had wanted to scream at her, to take her face in her hands and tell her that her mother was dead and that she had hated her and she didn’t know how to live without her and that she was terrified.

But instead, she said, ‘Lee Scratch Perry? Never heard of him.’

‘He’s a complete nutter,’ Saoirse grinned. ‘If you’re lucky he’ll be wearing a disco ball on his head …’

Inside the club, the room was dark and thick with cigarette smoke and dry ice as they moved through the crowd towards the bar.

‘What you drinking?’ Saoirse asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Gabriela shrugged, as if what she wanted no longer counted for anything.

As Saoirse leaned in to order, Gabriela turned away and that’s when she saw him, across the bar, watching her.

‘Here you go …’ Saoirse handed her a shot of tequila and Gabriela winced, licking the line of salt from her hand, the granules rough against her tongue, feeling the burn of the alcohol in her throat as she tossed back her head, sinking her teeth into the flesh of the lemon, her eyes squeezing together, pushing against the pain.

‘Shit!’

‘Right, another one!’ Saoirse lined up two more shots. This time when Gabriela looked up she felt someone next to her and as she turned she saw him there, an inch or so away. Saoirse raised her eyebrows and grinned as if she were about to say something, but then she turned and started speaking to someone standing next to her, and then she was dancing on the other side of the room.

‘Same again?’ Gabriela lip-read his words through the smoke machine, his voice straining above the clash of the keyboards.

She shook her head, shuddering, and a moment later he passed her a beer.

Pausing briefly, she took the drink and clinked the base of her bottle against his.

‘Thanks.’

He nodded and smiled, as if he was considering something.

‘What?’ She couldn’t help but smile back at him.

He shook his head, still holding her eyes. ‘Nothing.’