When we were getting ready to leave the club, there was a layer of sweat on my torso, and Jenny’s lipstick needed a touch-up because I had kissed her heavily on her lips and they appeared to be bruised. Jenny was annoying me because she couldn’t find her ticket for the cloakroom, and she kept trying to remember the number and describing her jacket to the girl working the cloakroom. She even described it as ‘a thing of great beauty’ and the girl was losing her patience. I stepped in and managed to convince her to have another look. She found it and handed it to me and alluded to the fact that perhaps Jenny had had a little too much to drink. This observation didn’t wash well with my Jenny and she began to cause a bit of a scene. I managed to convince her to drop it and she agreed, though with reluctance.

Out on to the street we stumbled vaguely like the rest of the clubbers. They shouted a bit. Heads nodded in agreement with each other about how fucking great the club was, and Jenny and I stood near them but we weren’t part of the group. We were on our own, and she started to pull out cigarettes from her bag. I didn’t like her smoking but I said nothing. We stood like that for a couple of minutes. I watched Jenny smoke. Despite the fact that I didn’t approve of her smoking, I was drawn to the delicate movements in her fingers as she brought the cigarette to her lips. She inhaled as though the very act of inhalation was an offering as something almost religious, or sexual. I had an acute sense of the depth of my feelings for her at that particular moment. The street lamps emitted a glow against the coldness of the night air. Jenny huddled her body into her over-sized tweed jacket and I said, let’s get chips.