‘You got so lucky with your view,’ she murmurs, staring out of my grubby second-floor window. ‘You can see the lake and the ducks and everything. My room looks out onto the bloody staff car park.’

‘Trust me, it’s not lucky,’ I say, remembering the racket the ducks used to make. ‘Listen to this lot.’ I lean past her, catching a scent of her perfume as I do, and crack the window open. The sound of hooting and quacking comes floating in, along with a blast of bitingly cold wind. ‘They’re like this all night,’ I say. ‘Honestly, I barely sleep in here.’

She laughs, her brown eyes twinkling. ‘So that’s why you’re always late for lectures. The ducks.’

‘Exactly. Blame the ducks.’

She glances out of the window again. ‘They’re probably hungry …’

She jumps up and bolts out of the door. When she comes back in a few seconds later, she’s swinging a half-empty bag of sliced bread. There’s a Post-it note stuck to it that reads: MAREK’S – DO NOT TOUCH. For a self-styled anarcho-communist, Marek always had surprisingly conservative views on food-sharing.

‘On a scale of one to ten,’ Daff says, ‘how pissed off will Marek be if we nick two slices of his bread?’

‘I’m going to say eleven,’ I tell her. ‘But let’s do it anyway.’

She drops back down on the bed and hands me a slice. We both poke our heads out of the window into the freezing night air. And as we lean out, shivering, we’re pressed right up against each other, arm to arm, so close that her loose curls are spilling onto my shoulder. We start dropping the bread.

‘This is not doing anything for the noise levels,’ I say over the excited honking.

Daff laughs, and nudges her shoulder into mine. ‘Yeah. Plus it’s absolutely freezing.’ She dusts her hands off and watches as the crumbs rain down. ‘Come on, let’s go back in.’

We retreat inside and shut the window again. She recrosses her legs, and wraps both hands tightly around her tea mug to warm them up.

‘It’s crazy how quickly this first term has gone,’ she says. ‘Before we know it, uni will be over.’ She shakes her head at the idea. ‘We’ll be twenty-one. We’ll be actual adults.’

‘We are technically actual adults now, you know,’ I say.

She gives me a perfectly deadpan look. ‘Ben, we’ve just spent the last hour playing hide-and-seek in a hedge.’

I laugh. ‘Good point.’