‘Yeah, the Mixer. Open, like, nearly ever.’ Emil had once hit the tequila here till 5 a.m., on one of his few successful nights out in London. They’d only left in the end because the barman – having put the lights on and killed the music in a vain attempt to encourage patrons to go home – had moved on to Plan C, which involved smashing his fist on the cash register and using phrases like ‘I am at breaking point’, which the friends did not need Duolingo to grasp the general sense of.

Steffi hesitated. ‘I don’t want to get stuck.’

‘You can stay in mine.’ Emil realized how eager this sounded; regretted that his English was such a blunt instrument. But if you didn’t ask, you didn’t get anywhere. ‘I have, how to say it, a bed, it hangs.’

He mimed the hammock which hung as a sort of ersatz spare bed in his landlord’s flat, because the landlord was a 23-year-old whose rich parents had bought him the place as a ‘start in life’, and he had spent a post-uni travel year filling it with international artefacts – rattan blankets, drums, weird-ass skulls – which Emil and four others lived around, like squatters in a museum, for £700 each a month. Like a reluctant charades partner, Steffi guessed the word but had to google it to make sure. Emil had googled it too, and for a strange moment the two of them stood, far from their birthplaces, in the small-hours grey, looking at pictures of hammocks on their mobiles.

‘All right,’ said Steffi at last. It was hard to see what other option she had. She couldn’t go home, with the situation as it was, and she wasn’t going to trail around the city on her own. ‘I will get us an Uber to this bar. We will message people and do whatever and find him. Then I’ll get an Uber home.’

Emil watched her fingers skip across the screen to summon a car and then share James’s number with him, in case her battery went. The series of digits – under the name James Flat – went on their way up into space and back down onto his phone, less than a foot away. Her nails were painted different colours, pink, red, black, but most of them were chipped away. Working in a restaurant, even just as a waiter, killed your hands. Emil had heard on a podcast that head chefs never appointed a sous if their hands were too pretty; it showed that they were scared of proper work. The day after he read it, Emil deliberately plunged his hand into a hot pan. It had stung for a week, but he was proud of the scar. Maybe one day he’d get one on the other hand.