Polly, the restaurant manager, was most attractive when she was angry with him.

‘The telephone,’ she said, ‘is for bookings only. It’s not for your personal use, Steven. It’s not for casual calls.’

She talked to him as if he wasn’t exactly in the same place as her. He’d been called up from the basement kitchen to the phone in the restaurant. It was not good for business – the sight of Steven with the sauce stains and the hair and the boots.

‘It wasn’t casual. It was important.’

‘Never again.’

It had been Manus on the phone. The guitar was fixed and ready for Sunday. Polly clipped away on her heels, and he was left to the KP corner – it was a mess of steam from the washer and towers of stacked plates and ancient sinks stained with green and brownish moulds. The way it was in the kitchen, if nobody was looking, he’d fork a couple of baby new potatoes somebody had left on their side dish and run them through the creamy sauce in the bain-marie. Nigel, the chef, caught him at the caper with the potatoes one day.

‘Pat likes his spuds,’ he said.

The shift was ten until three, six days a week, and the money was dirt but it filled the hours as he waited. Walking to the tube after, he enjoyed the warm air of the street, and he bought a tin of lager in the Paki shop – his new routine – and he sipped it as he went. He played tapes on the Walkman, his own compilations. They had been made in the bedroom at home before he had travelled. He hopped the barrier at the station – he had not so far bought a ticket.

Back in the squat, he lay on the mattress and he halfways slept and he had an erection. The excitement of the night lay ahead, and it was a great distraction from the Sunday.

It was ‘Feet First’ at the Camden Palace on Thursdays. He showered for it even. He had not yet managed to hook up the electric for the squat and the shower was ice-cold and reviving. He burned a candle in the windowless bathroom for the mirror and he got himself made up to the hilt. He drank from a bottle of red wine as he worked on his face. He set water to boil on the Argos campstove he had bought with his first wages. When the water was ready, he stirred five spoons of sugar into it, and with careful fingers he worked the mixture into his hair, teasing out the strands until they were high and as if wind-blown.

All summer long he had been in rut heat and lonesome. He was in love with the girl in the Italian chipper. He was in love with Polly the restaurant manager. He was in love with the middle-aged lady who pulled pints at Presley’s and called him ‘Ducky’.

‘You’ll have your Guinness, Ducky?’