I smoke the cigarette to its embers and flick it into the street. My bones are beginning to seize from the deepening cold. My head drums up an ache once again and I crouch in the doorway to ease the pain. Once the throbbing has died away a little, I lean in against the door in a familiar position. I used to sit this way for hours, in those first days on the streets, when I needed to catch up with the chaos in my head, and to silence it. Eventually the silence descended, on the third or fourth day, in a doorway just like this one. I was watching people flowing past as if they were parts of a river, their legs washing by. Then silence came when I discovered there was only me in the world – me on one side and everything else held aloft on the other. The weight of my existence in perfect counterweight to the entire universe.

I think of Grace sometimes in terms of her weight against mine – hers an equal and opposing force to mine. We were opposites that attracted. For example, I couldn’t get on board with the whole Buddhism thing. I didn’t understand how a rational, mathematical mind could be so seduced by what was essentially fable and myth-making. But she didn’t see what I saw.

‘Buddhism is essentially mathematical,’ she said once, trying to explain.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. Come on, Xander: the Golden Ratio. You were the one who told me about it.’

I probably had, but as I’d tried to explain to her, the spiral of a conch, or the curl of a fern, was just a function of the coding in the cells. ‘It looks mathematical because it uses mathematical code,’ I said.

‘But all that proves is that God or the Universe is a mathematician,’ she said. ‘You really should come and speak to Ariel about this. You’d like him, Xander.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Because you’re the cleverest man I know and he’s – he’s the most spiritual.’

The yoga teacher was another thing. He was always buying her trinkets or giving her ‘amazing’ head massages. She couldn’t see the jealousy ponding in me so she kept trying to make me meet him. Once, it must have been when we were on our way to work, I tried to tell her.

‘What?’ she said, skipping a little to catch up. Her perfume tugged at me.

‘I don’t know. Just. Does he have to keep giving you massages?’ I said and then regretted it.

She tucked her spare arm into mine. ‘Head and neck massage. It’s for pressure points. So I can put up with you!?’