We were both giggling now. ‘How’s Sam?’ I asked.

‘Oh, fine as well. I feel a bit tame, if you want to know the truth, compared with you.’

‘Lo, I’ve got to go.’ I felt a little guilty, talking about Paul while standing in the middle of his kitchen. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘I hope you’re using a condom,’ Lola said smartly as she rang off, echoing my often repeated warning to her.

Paul reappeared in jeans and a white T-shirt, his hair damp from the shower and sticking in dark feathers to the nape of his neck. ‘Everything okay?’

‘I was talking to Lola.’

‘Ah. Should I worry about this?’

‘Not at all,’ I reassured him. Jack was enough to worry about.

We walked in the park and ate a picnic of takeaway sandwiches in the shade of a huge horse-chestnut tree. Paul threw crusts for the pigeons. They strutted on gnarled feet and rushed at each other with beating wings to defend their pickings. All around us were couples lying openly entwined on the grass, and babies in buggies shaded by little frilled parasols, and groups of noisy softball players, and odd-looking solitary men wearing too many clothes who watched the nearly naked girl sunbathers. This afternoon’s benign version of the city was much more familiar to me. It was the place where Penny and Evelyn cycled to the farmers’ market with Cassie in her seat on the back of Penny’s bike, where winter rain pocked the windows and where the slow queues at the bus stops and checkouts were silently long-suffering. The recent threatening version was hatched out of the weird, prolonged hot spell. The heatwave had lasted so long that I couldn’t imagine proper rain ever falling again, rather than a few drops spat out by thundery clouds that wouldn’t yield a proper downpour.

In the early evening, when the metal disc of the sun slid to a lower angle but the air still seemed to heat your lungs as you sucked it in, Paul and I drove to Turnmill Street. Sullen faces loomed out of the crowds at crossings and mutinous gaggles kicked at tin cans spilling from litter bins. Every surface, flat or vertical, was stained with unidentifiable blotches of putrescent liquid and masked with dirt.

We parked the car and walked slowly towards Audrey’s house.

Jack had withdrawn from both versions of the city. Refusing to engage with either, for the past five days he had barricaded himself inside the shadowy house with Audrey and the cats and hedgehogs and rabbits for company. Part of me couldn’t blame him. He knew what it was like to be a bird in flight and to be bound to such a breathless, dirt-marked, sullen earth must be agony for him.