There aren’t many people who make him feel small, but Sally-Ann manages it. She’s an inch or two shorter than he is, but the heels she’s wearing tonight give her the edge. She’s well built, what his parents’ generation might generously have called statuesque. The lads at the station are less charitable. They treat her the same way they do the oversized photocopier, like she’s an obstacle to be negotiated rather than a human being. Not just the lads, either. Other women, too. There’s something in the way people look at her, he’s noticed, as though her physique is a condition that might be catching. For some reason none of them can see beyond the excess flesh to the pretty woman underneath. Probably because she hides it so well. She has savagely cropped blond hair that looks as though she might have taken the scissors to it herself, and wears elaborate Gothic outfits that succeed only in emphasizing her size and shape. It’s as though she’s ashamed of her appearance and yet stubbornly defiant at the same time. He likes that about her. Tyler has no problem with rebellion.

Tonight she’s wearing a long-sleeved black velvet top with furry frills at the cuffs and collar, skinny-fit jeans that turn her thighs into dark-blue sausages, and ruby-red heels à la Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. There’s a bit more personality to the outfit than the one she wears for work, but essentially it’s the same. He feels the dampness still gathered in the armpits of his own thin cotton T-shirt and wonders how she’s managing not to pass out in the heat.

“I’m so glad you came,” she says, so gushingly sincere that if he didn’t know her better he might think she was being sarcastic. But she’s always sincere, Sally-Ann. Irritatingly so. It makes it very difficult to be cynical about her. Not for the first time, he wonders how old she is. There’s a freshness to her face, an innocence in her eyes, that makes him think she’s a fair few years younger than he is. But the heavy, draped outfits and the excess weight she carries make her seem far older. She has that silky, husky voice that men always seem to find attractive in women, despite the fact it’s oddly masculine. The lads take the piss out of her when they hear her on the radio, joking about how she could moonlight as a phone-sex chat-line operator. He doesn’t think she knows that. He hopes she doesn’t anyway.

“I said I’d come.”

“Yes,” she says, “and I could tell how keen you were.”

She isn’t wrong, and part of him is still wondering why he’s here.