‘We should probably go,’ said James, ‘we’re essentially stealing snacks here.’

‘Yeah, I can’t afford to get banged up,’ said Michaela. ‘I’ve got to shower and go meet my girlfriends.’

The way she said this, it sounded as if she was trying to draw a line under the conversation. But then, as they turned away towards their respective doors, she mentioned casually that she was thinking of organizing a little drink after the third class, and was that being a bit weird and premature because they’d all hardly met? James said no, it was a good idea, and he ended up giving her his phone number. The day after next she texted him to say she was worried people would ‘judge’ her for wearing yellow three times in a row, and James – after mentally redrafting the message for a whole hour, while driving – wrote back: ‘Yellow suits you’.

After the final class, he was waiting for Michaela by the machine with a bottle of Lucozade he’d bought, and she asked him if he wanted to have dinner.

*

‘Dinner’ was a less straightforward proposition for James than it was for most people.His ideal situation would probably have been to continue dating her exclusively by the vending machine. He’d done well in a setting where the only requirements were to make very small amounts of light-hearted conversation and ram his elbow into something. A restaurant was likely to demand too much of the first and none of the other.

Karl helped him choose a dark navy shirt from Reiss (‘You can’t wear black to a date, you’re not in the SS’) and steered him away from trying to prepare conversational nuggets. ‘I’m just worried she’ll ask something and I’ll blank,’ said James. On a date last year a woman had asked James for his fantasy dinner-party line-up, and he’d panicked and chosen Stalin and Noel Edmonds.

‘You don’t have to worry about that, fam. It isn’t an exam, you’re literally just having a bit of dinner.’

James wasn’t sure how sound Karl’s romantic advice was likely to be, given that even in the past month he’d had a credible death threat from a spurned girlfriend, but he needn’t have worried. Having dinner with Michaela turned out to be just like talking to her in the gym, except with flamenco guitar in the background.