I glanced down. ‘Badly bruised. I was sure it was broken.’

‘You’ve been to X-ray?’ He was looking down at the ankle with a gaze of professional assessment.

‘You’re a doctor?’

‘Yes.’ He bent down and, without asking my permission, lifted the edge of my grey jogging pants to look at the bandaged ankle. ‘You won’t be running any marathons for a while.’

My response was lame. ‘I’ll need a lot of help.’

He stood upright and looked at me. ‘Have you got help at home?’ He was gazing right at me as he asked this – yes, grey eyes with a greenish tinge.

I responded in a tone of voice that suggested I was shy. ‘No, I live alone.’ God, Lisa, you’re shameless, I thought.

As I was handing over this important piece of information, my minicab slowed to a halt behind him, the driver at the wheel the same one who had brought me to the City Care Centre two and a half hours earlier.

‘Matthew,’ the young man said. ‘People call me Matty. He’s not supposed to pull in there, we’d better get you in. Give me your phone number.’ None of this was a question.

A security guard stepped forward from the centre’s entrance and said to the driver, ‘You can’t pull in there, I’ve told you, ambulances only.’

The driver had wound down the window. He and the security guard clearly had previous. ‘I transport injured people too, you know, mate. All you do is stand there all day long.’

‘Shift your arse,’ the security guard replied.

The driver wound up his window, glared in my direction, then stabbed the air viciously with his finger towards a pick-up point some fifty metres away, before gunning his engine and taking off.

‘I’ll help you,’ said Matthew/Matty, and took my elbow.

As he did, I felt a soft brush against my injured ankle. I looked down and saw a black-and-white cat that had chosen that particular moment to perform a figure of eight around my feet: a hospital cat, possibly, or one from the new housing development opposite. It looked too well fed to be a stray: maybe it was a ghost cat, an unreal cat, the cat that shows up in fairy tales with a message or a warning and then disappears into thin air.

I bent to stroke the cat – it lifted its body to push the top of its head against the palm of my hand, its front paws rising from the pavement. The young man with the single streak of silver in his dark hair still had hold of my elbow. He was standing quite close to me. I felt my hair tumble forward and I knew that he was looking at my hair tumbling forward and paused for a moment to acknowledge to myself the pleasure of being looked at. In my head, I watched myself being watched.