This is it. My heart is pounding. We open the car doors at the same time and, choreographed under the lamplight, we step out over our shadows and walk across the road, footsteps beating rhythmically in sync. He points his remote at the car and it peeps and flashes its lights coyly. From his house there’s a loud eruption of noise: a dog starts barking …

‘Shit!’ I say, stopping dead while David carries on up the path alone, keys now jingling in his pocket.

I feel a rush of adrenaline, and escalating panic. I’d forgotten about the dog.

I am overwhelmed by a sense of danger. It’s barking as if it’s using an amplifier.

It’s barking a warning bark, a get-off-my-property message, a clear leave-my-owner-alone threat.

It’s barking with a rage that’s directed at me, so vicious that I can feel myself shrinking, powerless and vulnerable.

I quickly pull the metal gate closed with a clang. I’ve got to get away before David opens the door, because once that door is open that dog’s going to come rushing out, motivated, impelled, galvanised to attack me by the smell of fear – and that gate’s not going to stop it in its tracks.

I run back as fast as I can towards Chalk Farm Road, coat flying, my vision pulsing with the throb of my heart, hoping I can find a bar still open in which to take refuge. Reggae music is playing up to the right, so I bowl into Cotton’s Rhum Shack and push into the crowd at the bar, into safety, my breath sobbing in my throat.

‘Slow down, lady,’ the barman says over the sound of steel drums. ‘We’re not closing yet.’

I put a tenner on the bar. ‘JD, no ice, please.’

‘Bad night, huh?’

‘I’ve escaped from the jaws of death,’ I tell him, getting my phone from my bag to find David’s number to explain the truth about why I ran away.

But then I stop and think about it, because this is how it’ll go. If I call him, David’ll ask me what just happened and I’ll have to explain to him that I’m scared of dogs. He’ll laugh and tell me that his dog is an old softy who just wants to play. He’ll then want me to go back and make friends with it, not knowing how much I hate dogs and how much they hate me. Only I know that and because of that I won’t be able to do it. I won’t be able to force myself to do it because my fear will cause every nerve in my body to scream at me to get away for my own protection.

‘Here you go.’ The barman slides my whisky to me.

‘Thanks.’