We finished our drinks and Charlie went to the bar. The aggrieved couple were still there. They looked like they worked in the City, in their forties, wearing expensive suits and with expressions that said they weren’t used to being fucked with. They were talking loudly about how they were going to spend Christmas skiing in a five-star resort ‘away from the plebs and all our fucking relatives and their brats.’

When Charlie sat down I told her the rest of the story. About how I’d been rushed into surgery in the small hours of the morning, how all I could remember was being wheeled down the corridor, then waking up with my eye taped shut and a complicated prescription for eye pressure tablets and four different kinds of drops. I had a gas bubble in my eye which would keep my retina in place while it healed. All I could see out of my left eye was a big, wobbling bubble that obscured everything I looked at. I had to sleep sitting upright so gravity would keep the bubble in place.

I spent those first ten days listening to books or watching box sets with my good eye. The tablets bent my senses and made everything taste peculiar, especially alcohol, meaning I didn’t drink for two weeks, though when I went out my depth perception was so awry that everyone thought I was drunk.

‘It was a pretty shit few weeks,’ I said to Charlie, able to laugh about it now.

‘You’re lucky not to have lost the sight in that eye, then? Though I reckon you’d look good with an eye patch.’

I resisted the urge to put on a pirate voice.

Charlie said, ‘What’s your problem?’

It took me a moment to realise she wasn’t addressing me but the couple at the bar.

The woman was visibly taken aback and moved to turn away but the bloke she was with sneered at Charlie. He was drunk and I felt a prickle of concern that things might escalate into, if not physical violence, then at least the verbal kind.

‘You’re our problem,’ the man said.

Charlie sat up straighter. ‘Oh really? Why’s that?’

‘You nicked our table.’

She opened her mouth with mock horror. ‘Oh my goodness. Did you hear that, Andrew? This is their table. I didn’t realise that, did you?’

‘Shut up, slag,’ the woman said.

‘Ginger minge,’ added the man.

Charlie looked shocked for a split second, then laughed. ‘Ginger minge! Wow, I haven’t heard that one for a long time. Since secondary school, in fact. Well, yes, it is ginger, as a matter of fact, not that I wear much hair down there. But colour-wise I like to go natural – unlike you.’

She looked pointedly at the woman’s dyed-blonde hair.