An idea was forming. He’d write to his parents again; write to them properly this time, not scrawled on airmail paper, or dashed out on the Hermes. He would sit and put pen to paper and try to make them understand what he couldn’t fully explain, even to himself: that he couldn’t come home, not yet.

At a stationer’s shop he bought a bottle of ink, and asked the owner – in mangled Spanish and worse French – about a new nib for the ink pen. The man seemed surprised, but after a few minutes of rooting through drawers, he produced a box of nibs. They tried them out in the pen until they found one that fit.

Armed, Sam made his way to the Gran Café de Paris and chose a quiet table in the corner. He took out the ink, the new nib, and centred the leather case before him.

When his coffee arrived, he leafed through the paper to find the least yellowed sheet, and set it on the top. His hands were trembling slightly as he dipped the pen into the ink and held it poised. It felt egotistical to stain one of those old pages with his writing, but at the same time, the case had sat idle for fifty years, hadn’t it? Surely it was time for it to break its silence? He smiled, touched the nib to the paper, and began to write.

1928. That’s what the calendar in the lid said. The clink and chatter of the café faded around him. If only he held the pen tightly enough, wrote fast enough, he might look up and find himself back there, when living was wild and Tangier was filled to the seams with people like him; people who didn’t fit anywhere else, who had chased themselves across Europe to this city in order to turn themselves inside out with drugs and glamour and mistakes …

‘Monsieur?’

A waiter stood above him, looking expectant. Sam blinked hard. For an absurd moment, he thought an old-fashioned motorcar might drift past the window, thought he’d hear jazz on the radio and see people in the clothes of half a century before.

‘Yes?’ he asked, rubbing at his forehead, trying to pull his mind back into the present.

‘Another?’ the waiter asked, pointing at the long-emptied coffee cup.

‘Yes, yes, thanks,’ Sam mumbled. He didn’t really want another one, but neither did he want to leave the cocoon he’d created around himself. It reminded him of the few times he’d written something good; when whole hours had been lost to the act of creating a world, spinning it into existence using nothing but the words inside his head. It had been like that, before the waiter interrupted.