Perhaps I could have put it better. But I was still taken aback when she responded to what I was trying to tell her by sticking her tongue out at me. It wasn’t an aggressive poke exactly, it was more a sort of slow squeeze, the gradual appearance of a third lip between the other two. Now, whenever I see a nature programme on television about volcanic activity in Rotorua, and there are slow motion shots of hot mud springs erupting, I am reminded of what took place on Mrs Flatman’s face that night. At the time I was electrified by it. Childish as her gesture was, it also reminded me of her seniority. It dated her precisely. I wasn’t in possession of all the relevant social history but I was sure that sticking your tongue out was a highly lubricious act in the 1940s. Hadn’t English girls driven G.I.s wild doing that? I wasn’t in any doubt, at any rate, that the young Rabika Flatman had.

And that the old Rabika Flatman hadn’t forgotten the trick. It certainly worked with me. I was instantly hot and hers. I followed her around all night paying her gross compliments. God knows what my parents thought. Or Mr Flatman, who couldn’t have been so engrossed in that simple noisy card game in which you had to collect sets that he didn’t notice. But I was careless of opinion or publicity. And I forgot completely about Sharon and Fitzpiers. All I was interested in was getting Mrs Flatman to show me once again the pink tip of her tongue, and then after that all I was interested in was getting her to pass the wet bubble of her mockery from her lips to mine. I wasn’t seeking a transfer of power, I simply wanted her to taste the full extent of her own. I swear I had nothing else in mind when I at last caught her coming out of the bathroom onto an empty landing and pushed her back again and turned the lock on us. I bent her over the sink and went in search of what I wanted. And for a moment, as she relaxed beneath my weight and laughed Pimms No I into my face, I believed I had found it. There seemed to be no end to her old fashionedness. She lifted one foot, she pressed one of her knees between mine, she trembled. Back, back she took me. And sweet, sweet was the sensation of wrongness – the confusion of time and needs and persons. But it was also brief. ‘No,’ she said, breaking from me, ‘no, no, this is terrible!’ And she was out of that door and down those stairs as if what we’d done had the primal eldest curse upon it.