‘Well, it’s a stupid question, isn’t it? I say yes, she’ll think she’s my fucking girlfriend. If I say no, I’m a bastard. She must have known that I liked her a bit - I paid a mint to take her out and get her loaded. I don’t have to do all that just to get laid. Girls only ask that because they want reassurance.’

Omar was silent at this. It was a question he asked in his head all the time, to his parents, to his schoolmates, to the girls who looked past him at the gigs, to his brother even. ‘You like me, don’t you? Please say you like me.’ Sharif was so lucky never to need reassurance - to be so confident that he would be loved and desired just for being himself.

‘I’ll get off to bed, man. I’ve got a test tomorrow,’ Omar said, heading back to his room. Lying alone in his bed, staring at the moonlight reflected on his ceiling, he tried to imagine making love to a faceless body; someone who took pleasure in him touching them in the most intimate way possible, and who made him feel like a king, and wanted nothing more from him for all of this than the simple reassurance of being liked.

Parvez Khan Mourns the Loss of Love

FAILURE SHOULDN’T BE surprising - it’s just a part of life, like breathing and eating and singing. We fail at something at every stage in our development, every small success preceded by failure after failure. And sometimes followed by it, too. Each first faltering infant step preceded by flump after flumpy fall chest-first on the floor or, if you’re lucky, into someone’s arms. We fail at exams at school, which seems terrible, until we leave school and then we fail in all sorts of new ways that we hadn’t even known about before. At our driving tests, at having children, at understanding those children, in our financial decisions, in our workplaces … and then we fail to keep our tempers about our failures, and let our bad humour affect those unfortunate enough to be close to us.