Lisa blew smoke from her sensual mouth. She was smoking a Gitanes through a silver holder, sitting opposite him on the floor, and her legs were folded with comfortable ease into a half-lotus. Tin lanterns hanging from the ceiling cast a trellis of light on to the walls. ‘You should’ve told her, Dan,’ she said.

‘I did tell her! I just said that I did, that’s my whole point.’

She shook her head again. ‘No, before you went,’ she said. ‘You should’ve told her your plans.’

‘You’re kidding me?’

‘Bad news, man,’ Frank said. He was ageing by the day, it seemed, and doing it stoned. Lisa had given up weed for a while, because Frank – she said – needed her ration as well as his own. He was stretched out on a narrow bunk in a vest and baggy Y-fronts, his legs – nut-brown and almost fleshless – extending along the length of the mattress, and he looked at the ceiling as he spoke. ‘Uncool.’

Dan felt briefly devastated to be chastised by this pair, whose own lives on the very margins of society had been so unconventional, so unfettered.

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘When did anyone ever ask permission to have an affair?’

Lisa and Frank looked at each other. ‘Nineteen seventy-two, nineteen eighty,’ Frank said, oddly alert for a moment, using his fingers as counters, and Lisa nodded, and added, ‘Nineteen eighty-five, -seven and -nine,’ and then they each turned their benign brown eyes on Dan.

‘Wow,’ he said. He couldn’t ever remember them being quite so succinct. ‘You’re talking about each other, right? Well, look, you guys are very special people, but I know for sure and certain that that wouldn’t work for Katelin. She’s no good at sharing.’

‘But your conscience would be clear. You’d have told her,’ Lisa said. ‘That’s the point.’

‘Share your choices, man,’ Frank said. ‘It’ll blow your mind.’

Dan closed his eyes and said, ‘I can only imagine,’ and resolved, in that moment, to give up on them for anything other than their memories and their marijuana, but Lisa wasn’t finished. She reached across the narrow space that divided her from Dan and rested a hand on his knee.

‘We love you, Dan,’ she said. ‘Be happy.’