This was something they shared, a synthetic pleasure payload. Sometimes they ate the sweets in the park. Other times they ate them in front of the TV in the lounge at Goodenough. They liked watching crappy sitcoms of suburban family life, though neither of them came from families like that, the nuclear kind that lived together as a unit.

Early on, Jimmy told her that his mother had passed away. His father, a writer, made his living translating books but lost most of his money gambling. Three years before, he’d broken into Jimmy’s flat and stolen most of his life savings, the wads of banknotes he’d kept from cash-in-hand jobs. This was why Jimmy had to take time out of his studies to tend bar full-time. It was why he’d moved in with his aunt and uncle. He showed them his appreciation by helping in their shop, taking care as he stacked the shelves to face the labels outwards.

They had come to rely on him, Jimmy told her, and asked his advice on where to send their son to school, what the new tax rules meant, what the different political parties were sounding off about on TV. Jimmy was dismissive – uninterested – when it came to the last point, and Phoebe was not much better. She had grown up in a Hong Kong that had no direct elections and this had left her apathetic about politics in general. In years to come, when fresh-faced high school students started rallying en masse, she would feel moved to see them doing what adults hadn’t done. But that year – that run of years – she was wrapped up in her own concerns, focused on getting through medicine and coming out the other side alive.

Jimmy was right about one thing. Term was coming to an end. In a frigid dissection room, working late, she finished with her cadaver. It was not the one from first year, but a new one she was assigned for a respiratory module. When she was done, she said farewell. Not knowing the dead man’s name, she thought of him as Ross (from certain angles he resembled the character on Friends). She sat her exams the following week, then called her mother to say she was coming home.

‘Not now, sweetie,’ she was told. ‘I’m having the floors repolished.’ So Phoebe went out of town instead – to green and hazy Hampshire, where Grace’s parents had a house. She spent several days being fussed over. ‘You poor thing,’ they said, ‘here in England by yourself, with your parents in Hong Kong.’

She didn’t set them straight on her father’s whereabouts. They were only being kind.