At first she is bored, put off by the simplistic, static camera work, the clunky monologues to the camera, and considers turning it off, but then Ingrid Bergman sweeps in and the film ignites. It is like watching a boxing match between two heavyweights, evenly matched, round after round of brutal pummeling, as a mother and a daughter go head to head, raking over the bones of their relationship. Half an hour in and Lissa is aware she is holding her breath. By the end of the film, she is a small tense ball, arms locked around her knees.

When it is finished, she gets up and walks around the living room, feeling the blood come painfully back into her limbs. She rolls herself a cigarette and opens the window, sitting on the sill as she smokes. It has grown dark outside, and the night air lifts her skin in her vest top. The smell of gas mingles with the smell of fried food, the charcoal of the barbecues drifting from the park.

She thinks of Nathan, of his face in the library. I needed therapy after that film. The sort of thing that most men don’t say. But then, Nathan has never been most men.

It was thanks to Sarah that she met him. The first time was just after she turned twelve, when she refused to sit for her mother anymore, and since Saturdays were Sarah’s painting day, Sarah found herself a different model and Lissa was left to herself.

After a few weeks of watching crappy Saturday morning telly, she began leaving the house and walking down the hill to Camden without telling Sarah where she was going. Kids not much older than her were hanging out in groups on the canal. She took to buying a soda from a newsstand and then sitting on the bridge to watch them. Nathan was one of those kids. No particular tribe, just a North London teenager who hung out and smoked weed on a Saturday afternoon on the canal.

Once, on a chill afternoon, he came over to her. Are you all right? You look cold? She admitted she was and he lent her his sweater. It was big and warm and he had done that teenage thing of making holes for his thumbs, and they shared a can of cider. He gave her her first cigarette.

A few years later they would see each other at Camden Palace. They would hug each other—the way you did then, with your whole wide self—you could tell each other you loved each other and mean it, high and platonic in your tracksuit on a Friday night. Then he went off to university, and she never had his number and didn’t see him for years, until that night at Sarah’s opening, bumping into him just after graduation, introducing him to Hannah. When she was already with Declan.

He must be nearly forty now.