But now she had gone into full firefighting mode and she was the one leading the line, while Emil was making a poor job of executing her orders. He’d been told to go around the bar and try to borrow a charger, to revive Steffi’s overworked phone which was dangerously close to its death throes. Once more, though, the language was a problem. A panel of seven women around a table – all wearing angel wings, all with beer steins in front of them – had been disputing his request for some time, the conversation rerouting itself unhelpfully into other phone-related business and digressions which might as well be in Swedish for all Emil could follow of them.

‘What’s the ones you used to get, like before iPhones …’

‘Galaxy.’

‘No, you still get Galaxy. Nokia! That’s what I mean.’ The speaker, with jet-black hair and as thin as a USB wire herself, jabbed a rhetorical finger at the rest of the party. ‘Nokia, they were tiny, like a bar of soap …’

‘A bar of soap!’ said one of her friends, mockingly. ‘Are you on Coronation Street?’ Emil didn’t understand this jibe, or the tune which the group now broke into – some of them miming wind or brass instruments – but he recognized the quicksand feeling of a conversation slipping away from him.

‘So you do not have …?’ he said, appealing to the one woman among them who seemed less drunk, who was playing with her phone, perhaps carving out an escape.

‘I’ve got an Android,’ she replied, apologetic at least, ‘but actually my charger is like a, what’s it called, like a universal one, so it works on everything …’

‘I can borrow?’ asked Emil, the odds seemingly shifting back in his favour.

‘Oh, I haven’t actually got it here,’ his new friend clarified. ‘I was just saying, that would have worked, if I did have it.’ There was laughter at this, and a bout of what were probably nicknames being fired to and fro, and Emil retreated, feeling sick of this city, sick of how superior it felt to everyone who showed up at its doors. How superior it felt to him.

He made an empty-handed gesture to Steffi, but Steffi seemed untroubled by the news. She nodded calmly and motioned with her head to the bar. ‘OK, so what you can do is get us more drinks.’ This is progress, thought Emil. You didn’t propose extending an already late night unless you had some sort of interest in your companion, in ultimately going home with them. She was hard to read, but surely you didn’t.

‘No worries,’ he said, ‘you want the same or—?’

‘But also …’ Steffi hadn’t finished. She reached out her left hand, the black fingernail the main survivor from what had once been a colour chart. ‘Can I get your phone?’

‘My phone?’