I woke up again in the late afternoon, feeling sticky and with the discombobulated feeling you get when you sleep through the day for no good reason. I went down the corridor and ran a bath in the claw-footed enamel monstrosity that we have instead of a proper shower. I got it as scalding as I could take, yelped when it lapped against the bruises on my thigh, and stayed in there until my muscles relaxed and I got bored of impersonating Louis Armstrong singing “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” I couldn’t shave because of the cut on my cheek, so I left my chin with manly stubble and went to look for some clean clothes.

When I was growing up, the only way to keep my mum out of my room would have been to install steel security doors and probably not even that would have helped. It did mean that I’ve never been precious about people coming into my bedroom, especially if all they’re going to do is clean it and do the laundry. I put on khaki chinos, the quality button-down shirt, and my good shoes. I looked in the mirror. Miles Davis would have been proud of me; all I needed was a trumpet. There’s only one thing you can do when you look that good, so I picked up my mobile and called Simone.

It didn’t work—I’d blown the chip when I used magic on the Pale Lady.

I took one of my backup phones from the drawer in my desk, a crappy two-year-old Nokia with a pay-as-you-go SIM card. It already had my standard numbers saved so I added Simone’s and called her.

“Hi, baby,” I said. “Want to go out?”

When she stopped laughing, she said that she’d be delighted to.

Only students and people from Basildon go clubbing on a Sunday so we went to the Renoir to see Spirit of the Escalator—un film de Dominique Baudis, which turned out, despite the subtitles, to be a romantic comedy. The Renoir is an art cinema that sits underneath the Brunswick Center, a cream-colored shopping center and housing development that reminded me of an Aztec pyramid turned inside out. It’s less than two minutes’ walk from the Folly, so it was convenient. It’s also still got the old-fashioned seats where you can snuggle up to your girlfriend without injuring yourself on a cup holder. She asked me about the cut on my cheek and I told her I’d been in a scuffle.

Afterward we had supper at YO! Sushi—which Simone had never eaten at before, despite there being a branch practically outside her front door.

“I’m terribly loyal to the Patisserie Valerie,” she said by way of explanation.