‘I’m glad you came,’ he said, putting the produce back in their bins. ‘I was about to be picked up by security.’

Petra played along, glancing at the security guard at the door, a large man she’d seen here often and who seemed friendly enough, but who was actually training his gaze her way.

‘Nice though Leamington is,’ he continued, ‘they don’t like people like me loitering in the fresh produce aisle.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, remembering that rude idiot at the studio. He spoke like that simply because he could. ‘Sorry to make you stand here. I could have made a less awkward plan, hey.’ She deliberately let the South African inflection slip off her lips. She didn’t want to try to blend into the background, act like anyone else to impress him; she wanted him to get to know her as she was.

‘It’s alright,’ he said, making his way towards the exit, where he nodded at the guard. ‘Cheers, Zim.’

‘Where’s your shopping?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t want to carry loads of bags around. I’ll pick them up later.’

They settled on pizza and headed over to Basement Barry, ordering before finding a nook in the arched cellar downstairs, next to a rusted nautical artefact with a thick steel frame and a glass lens, and a Basquiat-style painting of a banana on a bicycle. Vincent snapped open his can of apple juice and Petra pretended to savour her sparkling water. She could have done with a glass of wine, but didn’t want to booze alone.

‘I still can’t get over the fact that I made you wait twenty minutes in the bloody Express and you didn’t even get to do your groceries. I’m so sorry!’

‘It’s alright.’

Now that she had the chance to sit across from him and really look at him, she still couldn’t place his age – the grey strands in his trim beard meant probably over thirty, but he could be a fresh-looking thirty-five or even forty-five. Would it be rude to ask? Yes. ‘So, were you holding that melon and cucumber the whole time? It was a good look.’

‘No. I was just trying something. I also checked out the local history books, which I’d never noticed before. It was quite interesting, actually. I thought I knew all there was to know about Leamington.’

‘Have you been here all your life?’

‘Yeah. My grandfather came here in the seventies.’

‘The Windrush generation?’

‘No. That was earlier. The fifties, after the war. My granddad came from Malawi, not the Caribbean.’

Petra was blushing, she could feel it. ‘Christ, what an idiot. I’m sorry.’

Vincent shrugged. ‘For what?’

‘I was only half the world out. Making stupid generalisations.’

‘It’s fine. You asked. More than most people do. Plus, my nan’s Jamaican, so you’re half right.’

She smiled her thanks to him.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I try not to bother about identity politics wherever I can avoid it. Sometimes it gets in your face but most of the time you can ignore it. It’s much better here than what my granddad went through in Malawi, what his family experienced when they first moved here.’