Ruby’s unreasonable anger at Renoko, it turned out, stemmed from an argument she had with him one lunchtime in the Faint Dime diner. It concerned the nature of kitsch. Renoko felt that kitsch was a product of an event he named ‘the postmodern ironisation’, prior to which it could not exist: before that, the objects you could now describe as kitsch were actually trash objects. ‘Without the operation of irony on trash,’ he maintained, ‘there would be no kitsch.’ To him, the postmodern ironisation was like the Death of History or the coming Singularity. ‘Everything was changed by it. Nothing could be the same again. It had the irreversibly transformational qualities of a Rapture.’ He believed it had those qualities even now.

Ruby’s commitment to body-art and collectible tambourines couldn’t let this go unchallenged. Prior to the age of irony, she thought, kitsch was already established. ‘It was low art’s idea of high art,’ she said – the aesthetic of people with no taste. Its keynote was sentimentality, not simply in conception but in use. Trash, for her, was another thing altogether, and it was with trash she found herself at home. A true low art, trash was the aesthetic of people who had no aesthetic, and in use it could almost be described as utilitarian. ‘In all its forms,’ she insisted to MP Renoko, ‘and across every media platform, trash is the art of demonstrating, celebrating – and above all getting – sex. It is a Saturday night art.’

Antoyne scratched his head. ‘What happened when you said that?’

‘What happened then was that a fist fight followed, which it soon drew in the entire lunchtime clientele of the Faint Dime, becoming a legend in its own time.’

‘It doesn’t seem enough,’ he said.

‘That, Fat Antoyne, is the big difference between us.’

Because of the weird grimness of the work they do, Ruby believed, quarantine dogs live their opinions hard and proud: so it was predictable Antoyne wouldn’t see such things as intensely as she did. Perhaps because of that it was good that their liaison retained its temporary nature.

They were standing outside the Faint Dime, 9:15 am. There was a smell of cinnamon coffee – a Dime speciality – and eggs. Morning light came down between buildings onto cracked tarmac. On Gravuley Street, everything else lay in grainy shade. It was like a black and white photograph, except for the triumphant pressed-steel values of the diner itself, caught in a ray of light and shining, as Ruby put it, ‘like this real future we are in, rendered with such impossible 3D fidelity as it is, in the language of algorithmic texture and image map!’ A few weeks later, the job was over. Antoyne never saw Vera Rubin’s World or The West Ural Nature Reserve or Ruby Dip again.