‘Romantic,’ she says. ‘When was the last time you ate?’ She flops onto the bed. We both hear a muffled wheezing sound coming from the room next door and a rhythmic thumping. Usually this kind of thing would send us into spasms of laughter, but today we both pretend it isn’t happening. She cracks a crap joke about me turning all Desperate Housewife-y with my candles and posh Egyptian cotton sheets. She makes a big show of eating some crap tuna sandwich, saying it’s delicious, when in actual fact the bread is curling up at the edges. She asks again where the window is.

‘Do you see any window, dummy?’

‘I didn’t know places like this exist. It feels like a storage cupboard.’

‘Seriously, Luce. I want you to get the fuck out of here. You don’t belong here.’

‘Neither do you,’ she says.

I tell her that I feel right at home here and am fitting in just fine, that I’ve met some of the other girls here and they’re cool. I know it’s ridiculous, under the circumstances, but I think Luce is jealous of these other girls. She’s been excluded from joining the gang again. I always had the edge there.

‘You can’t stay here. This place is a shithole,’ she says. I laugh. She tries a different tack. ‘Come on, let’s go outside and have a picnic. We can sit by the canal. It’s gorgeous out there.’

I’m still shattered and not in the mood to be sociable but reckon the path of least resistance is the right fork in the road to take, for now. And I owe her a picnic at the very least, after the way I treated her last time. What’s wrong with her that she just keeps coming back for more?

In the daylight, that spot where I met the girl last night is all businesslike, busy guys and some women, but mainly men in their suits, on their phones. I wonder was it one of these important-looking dudes who kerb-crawled us last night. The guy from last night spoke with a posh voice and surely could have afforded to do some ‘wooing’ – if that was what he was after.

I take the naggin out of my pocket and take delicate sips, Lucy muttering her disapproval: it’s too early, you need to eat something, you need to start looking after yourself, you don’t want to turn out like your mother.

Fuck that, Lucy Poo, not in the mood for a lecture.