He turns from the door and strides over to the table, picks up the television remote, turns it on – a woman brushing her teeth very firmly in close-up – turns it off immediately, goes back to the bed and sits, slumping, his arms triangled to support his upper body, his head resting back against the wall. He lifts his head, just an inch, and lets it thump back, giving it a small knock, as if he is cuffing the back of his own head for his clumsiness, stupidity, for the fact that after twelve years in this freezing cold grey country he still finds the women impossible – the way they behave, even the most brazen woman back home wouldn’t, and then if you take them up on it, how quickly they get affronted. He’s never worked it out.

He has made casual acquaintances of the men at work quite successfully, learned to mimic their speech patterns and gestures. He goes to the market on Saturday and helps dig the garden at a local old people’s nursing home once a month in order to put something back into the community. But he still can’t talk to the women.

Actually, that isn’t completely true. He had a girlfriend in London, briefly, a white woman ten years his junior who he met at the dole office. She was called Susan and they went out for a few months – well, went out wasn’t really the right phrase when they never actually went anywhere as they were both penniless. They stayed in, in his hostel room, which was similar to the one he lives in now. They never went back to her place because she was sleeping on a friend’s sofa and the friend had a load of kids, apparently. He was grateful for the sex, and she seemed to be as well, although she often cried afterwards and refused to tell him what was wrong. There wasn’t much talk, though, and he got tired of her, tired of how significant she seemed to think it was that she’d never slept with a black man before and he had never slept with a white woman, as if that was all there was to their relationship, bored of how they couldn’t even watch a TV programme together without her telling him how shocking it was that some people were racist, how she didn’t have a problem with the immigrants herself.