Sheila’s fat stone Buddha looked happy to see them, but Ali ignored his smile, just tipped him up, and there was the promised key – but they’d have broken in anyway if it hadn’t been there; they’d have smashed a window or battered down the door, because four hours of proximity in the car had them at a kind of fever pitch, and they both knew that until they’d had their fill of each other, they couldn’t speak another word. She unlocked the door and in they went; then she kicked it shut with her foot, dropped her bag, leaned against the wall and stared at him. Wordlessly, he came at her, kissing her mouth, her face, her neck, and she hung on to him, responding with the same furious passion. She moved to the stairs, pulling him with her, and they stumbled up to the prayer-flag room where the window was propped open, though there was no relief from the heat, no breeze at all, and the flags above their heads might have been painted on the walls, they were so still. Dan and Ali fell on to the sleeping mat, half laughing, half crazed, tearing off their inconvenient clothes without ceremony or erotic ritual; they simply flung themselves at each other, and if they should’ve been solemnly honouring their teenage selves – remembering the first time, remembering the last – they absolutely didn’t, not for a second. She’d wondered, in the car – worried, truth be told – if, when this moment came, there might be awkwardness, or self-consciousness, an awareness of their bodies that in youth were so effortlessly, casually lovely. But then, in the end, all that mattered was here and now: this delirium, the heat and damp, this flood of feeling; they claimed each other with a kind of desperate, selfish urgency, and when at last they fell away, they lay quiet for a while, slightly stunned, face to face, inhaling each other’s exhaled breath while their heartbeats calmed to an ordinary rhythm.

‘Alison,’ he said, ‘Alison, Alison, Alison,’ stroking her hair, her back.