“The fascists. She’d said maybe not in her lifetime, but in ours.”

At night Osama and I slept with our heads touching. He breathed through his open mouth, which sometimes produced a faint whistling sound. Once, as I was drifting off, his teeth suddenly clacked together involuntarily. In that instant I could hear and feel his skull through my own, which made me suddenly aware of my bones, my skeleton lying beside his skeleton. This little clack made me think of the Biblical gnashing of teeth, which I always found a rather amusing phrase. I tried to picture a human actually gnashing their teeth. What was this? Like dogs? Like Osama clacking his teeth while mouth-breathing in his sleep? Sometimes, when we slept, one of us would suddenly jolt. It would often happen just as we were drifting off. I did it quite a bit, and if Osama was still awake he’d laugh a little. He told me this reflex was an evolutionary layover from when we were mammals living in trees. If we fell asleep on a limb and began to fall backwards, our body’s instinct was to jolt us back in the direction we were facing. That said, he liked to imagine these sudden jolts were, in fact, our lives starting afresh. Or perhaps our souls being swapped.

And in a sense I had started life afresh. His friends were gradually becoming my friends. We spent our nights drinking in pubs or at their apartments. I even joined their after-work football team. We played on a pitch near King’s Cross — artificial turf hemmed in by tall metal fences topped with floodlights. One night on the bus ride home, he ribbed me about tucking my jeans into my socks. “You really have to queer everything, don’t you?” I continued tucking them in for another week or so, to prove a point. I didn’t want to lose myself in a couple. Lose I. Become a unit. Normative. Dulled. Dead. Did I think this little act of fashion subversion would save me?

Some mornings we set our alarm early and jogged along the mist-cloaked canal, through colonnades of woodsmoke from the tiny stoves aboard the narrowboats. At night we sat in bed reading; Osama usually finishing two books for every one of mine. And sometimes he would nestle into me, making a ridiculous cooing sound like a woodland creature, which he knew, without fail, would make me laugh.