‘Lara, right, got it. Well? Is she fit?’ Funny, thought Chris – this bluff, blokey turn of phrase he adopted with his army buddies. He never thought of girls as ‘fit’, or ‘racked’, and he often winced to hear these words in the mouths of others.

‘I don’t know exactly, I haven’t seen a photo. But Helen says she looks just like her, says they get mistaken for sisters all the time. And Helen is eff eye tee fit.’

Helen, it transpired, was stunning. She had longish hair the colour of slate, cut in a side-swept fringe that exposed a sweet sliver of pale forehead. Her blue eyes were expertly outlined in liquid eyeliner. Everything about her was sharply drawn, from her eyebrows to her cupid’s bow.

‘This is me—’ she said, turning her upper body from left to right and back as if modelling her own clothes.

‘You look … I mean…’ began Doug. Doug had a very red face that should have rendered him unattractive, yet somehow didn’t; now, confronted with Helen’s careless beauty, his cheeks darkened almost to burgundy. Chris looked at him in surprise. Doug was an evangelist of a pick-up manual that expounded the art of the ‘neg’ (a back-handed compliment, designed to hook a girl by lowering her self-esteem). He made a point of never being openly impressed by a woman.

‘—and this is Lara,’ finished Helen, giving her friend a light squeeze round the shoulders.

‘Hiya, guys,’ said Lara, with a little wave. She looked like Helen only in so far as she had dark hair cut in an identical style. The hair was obviously dyed. She was very short with a boyish torso, thrust outward to maximise the jut of her suspiciously high breasts. Where Helen was pale, Lara was tanned a deep ochre, although this colouring was mottled in places.

‘You’re, um, very brown,’ Chris told her as she sat down, then instantly regretted saying this.

But Lara was unconcerned. ‘Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it? Best thing is, I didn’t even have to go on a sunbed, and it’s all natural, it’s all my own pigment, right? These injections you can do, you get the kit online, melanotan it’s called. It’s not actually legal, but you’ve got to live life to the edge, right?’ She let out a laugh that stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

‘Gosh.’

Chris looked over at Doug for help, but the bugger merely winked and readjusted his seat so that they were more obviously arranged into two couples. He turned resignedly back to Lara. The only thing for it was to get drunk, fast. Chris picked up the bottle of wine and poured himself a generous glass.

Lara held out her own wine glass. ‘Oh yeah, please, fill me up. This is so fun, isn’t it?’ she said bossily. ‘Tell me now, what’s your name?’