‘I thought they were going to be seen ridin’ one another?’

‘Hardly at this hour. Sure there’s the watershed.’

The Jamaican’s name was Rainbow and his lips were blue from the crack pipe as he answered the door. The flat was kept as a shebeen and got out roughly as a kind of shanty-town bar. The curtains were tightly drawn and there were green fairy lights strung and there were bales of straw for decor and a lady somewhere in her thirties sat at a table licking the papers to seal a spliff. He followed Rainbow through the bar area to the kitchen and bought from him the ounce. Rainbow was not in the best of moods and called him a ‘bloodclat’ for no reason. Rainbow was unpredictable. To ease passage and smooth things out – he was a born diplomat – he bought a can of Red Stripe lager, also, and he went and sat with it at the table, by the lady, and they exchanged a smile, and she admitted handsomely that she was Rainbow’s sister.

‘A pleasure,’ he said.

Rainbow played a ragga step-out on the sound system and could be heard back there to gurgle and hiss and his sister called to him to keep it down, would you, boy, and she too was called a bloodclat. Rainbow, in a huff, then left the flat, screaming vengeance from his blue lips.

He was alone with the sister. She was not a shy girl by any means and she turned her doleful eyes to him and here, sure enough, and now – yes – this was where the heart might be spoken of.

‘Each morning,’ she said, ‘he’d wake me up with his dick in my back. That was lovely.’ He was a skinhead, she said, and it was the first time ever she had been with one of those. Definitely it was love, she said, there was no question about that. She exhaled a heavy greenish smoke that lingered and he felt a tingle from her look.

‘But then he start coming home later,’ she said, ‘didn’t he, and I’m, like, what the fuck? And was days he didn’t come home at all. And nights. I said you got another an’ she stashed someplace?’

Her features flashed a hard look as she revealed the skinhead’s treachery.

‘Turn out he was sticking his dick in more than one back,’ she said. ‘Turn out he couldn’t keep it away from backs.’

As he sat and listened, as they smoked the weed together and sipped at their tins of Red Stripe, he found himself growing angry. It was the way that she kept talking about dicks.

‘I’m not one of your girls,’ he said at last.

‘You what?’

‘You’re talking to me like I’m one of the girls,’ he said. ‘It’s dick this, dick that, and dick the other. You’re talking to me as if I don’t have one myself. You’re talking to me as if I’m not even here. You’re talking to me as if I’m not even a possibility.’