In fact, the place turned out to be not bad at all. The girls were friendly, and there was a boy, or he might have been a midget, who for a few pesetas would run down to the restaurant next door and bring back hot food wrapped up in newspaper. The food was good, too, if a bit on the oily side. There were things like miniature sandwiches held together with toothpicks that he really got to like. He asked the little guy what they were called, but the word was unpronounceable. Anyway, they tasted fine. He wouldn’t starve.

That evening, when he was lying on the bed smoking and reading his book – Pinkie seemed to be in for it, with people asking questions about the murder he and the gang had done and the law sniffing after him – there came a soft tapping at his door. He was in his underpants and shirt and socks.

Her name was Pepita, or so she said. She was tiny, way under five foot by his estimate, but she was a looker, with a heavy swatch of crow-black hair and shiny black eyes and little brown hands that made him think of some small furry creature, a squirrel, maybe, or one of those prairie dogs he’d seen in a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room.

On the first attempt, he wasn’t able to do anything. The Girl didn’t mind, and snuggled up against him contentedly and played with the short fair hairs at the nape of his neck. He was already thinking of her not as Pepita but as ‘the Girl’, the same way that in the book Pinkie was ‘the Boy’. Only she was no Pinkie, that poor loser. She was bright and quick, with a big wide smile, and smart, too, in her way. She had a lovely smell, musky and hot, as if she had been spiced, like food is spiced. Terry was very sensitive to smells.

The light in the window above them thickened and turned to a deep blue – or no, not deep, but thick, rather, a thick, torrid blue. He brushed his fingers up and down the Girl’s back until she made him stop, because it tickled. He listened to the sounds in the street, and after a while he fell into a doze.

When he woke up, the Girl was asleep with her head on his chest. A trickle of spit had come out of her mouth at the corner and fallen on to his skin and gone dry. That wireless or gramophone, or whatever it was, in the room above, was playing again. He thought he recognised the tune, though so far all the music here sounded the same to him.