His mother said to him, No dick, you understand? Fingers and tongue only, until she comes of age.

He grimaced at her. Yes, mother, I know.

‘Maybe we need an initiation ceremony,’ Zoe was saying, her face still hot. She mimed slicing her arm with a knife. ‘Some tribes in the desert cut their boys at puberty, so that they bleed, like girls, I learnt that in girls’ assembly. Mx Thompson said so.’

‘All the extra attention you get, as women,’ said Ravi. ‘Maybe boys need that.’

‘What attention?’ Zoe said. ‘We don’t get any attention.’

‘Your periods,’ said Ravi. ‘We don’t have a dramatic watershed moment. Maybe attention is the wrong word.’

Zoe felt all the blood that should have been draining from her womb, but wasn’t, rushing to her face.

His face was mischievous and joyous.

Fingers and tongue only, Raymond, repeated his mother.

RAVI: I became friends with Stella and Tara because I didn’t want to be a man like that.

JUDGE: Like what? Like Turkish men?

RAVI: I hardly know any Turkish men. Stell & T let me be myself. These men who’ve been going crazy; it’s hard for them, giving up a power which they only just discovered isn’t their god-given right.

‘Have you got any selfies with you and that . . . Ravi?’ said Kath.

Zoe shook her head. She felt shy about showing them the picture Ravi had taken.

‘God, you’re useless,’ said Kath.

‘You’ve got Green Club today, haven’t you? Get one then, OK?’

‘OK,’ said Zoe. But already she hated her friends for berating her.

Zoe looked out for Ravi in the school corridors, and in the yard, and in the streets around school.

‘Hey, Zoe,’ he said to her, as he passed.

‘Hey, Ravi,’ she said to him; as she wondered, with hot shame, what it would be like if they had sex.

CAMILLE: One night that autumn, sitting in the kitchen in London, the children in bed, Sebastian confided something in me. His brothers wanted to develop the island of Cwen.

‘Under what law can they do that?’ Camille said.

Sebastian poured a glass of wine. ‘They wouldn’t need to chop down the entire wood: some of the trees are an asset in property terms. But a lot of them would have to go.’ He got up and began drying plates from the sink.

Then: ‘I played in that wood as a child.’

‘The one where we ...?’

He nodded.

One of the al fresco fucks they used to favour was under an oak tree. There was silence, each thinking their own thoughts. It was quite corrupt, she felt, to cut down an old wood for profit, particularly when your job was lecturing other people – other countries even – on the importance of preserving forests. And there it was: the problem with the British. The British type of corruption was just more subtle than the rest. Their corruption had laws to uphold it. ‘All the things you’re saying about British colonialism, you could say for ancient Britain too,’ Seb had said with his infuriating calm in the midst of one of their early discussions about Africa. ‘Only, we don’t complain about the Romans. Or the Vikings. Or the Normans.’