‘Okay,’ said Beverley. ‘If you really want to know.’ She leaned over the table towards me and beckoned me to do the same and we didn’t stop until I could feel her breath against my cheek, could smell the clean warmth of her skin and see the verdigris discolouring the frame of her sunglasses.

‘You see us now?’ she murmured. ‘Close enough to whisper, close enough for me to smell the magic clinging to your skin, close enough that – if you had the bottle – you could kiss me?’

So I kissed her – just a brush pass, by way of polite inquiry.

‘Let’s see if we can keep this all metaphorical just for the moment,’ said Beverley, which is the story of my life, really. ‘The fact that we’re close together means that we’re undergoing an immediate and involuntary set of interactions – right?’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Immediate and involuntary.’

‘Now imagine you’ve got your face this close to a total stranger,’ she said. ‘What happens next?’

‘I pull back,’ I said.

‘What if you can’t? What if they literally won’t get out of your face?’ she asked.

‘Then I’d have to take steps, wouldn’t I?’

‘Exactly,’ said Beverley and kissed me.

I kissed her back – an immediate and voluntary action. It didn’t last quite as long as I would have liked because Beverley pulled back to stare at me over the rim of her sunglasses, her lips twitching into a smile.

‘But if you were stuck on the tube you might have to put up with being that close to a total stranger, right?’ she said. ‘Because all these things are contingent, aren’t they?’

Her dark brown irises, I noticed, were tinged with amber and gold around the pupils.

‘So it’s like personal space?’ I asked.

‘Only more sort of geographical,’ said Beverley.

Because on any other night she might have skipped merrily along the trail with no cares at all. Running into that kind of hostility had been a bit of a shock since Beverley, according to Beverley, generally gets to go where she likes.

I pointed out that I’d had to rescue her from the goddess of the River Teme and her daughters because she’d unwittingly trespassed on their territory, but Beverley waved that away with another cascade of bracelets.

‘That was a minor misunderstanding,’ she said. ‘And anyway, we came to a mutually beneficial arrangement.’

‘Which was?’

She leaned back in her chair and reached out to tap my bottle with her fingernail. ‘Drink your scrumpy,’ she said. ‘We’re going to a party.