He plugged the hard drive with Clio’s photos on in at the socket near him, checked the connection to his phone, let the WiFi connection clog up with his data as he transferred the pictures over. He looked at the spork with the stupid glasses in the window, saw him shake his tablet in frustration at the slowing signal and felt his irritation with the very existence of the place ease, as he knew he was being a pain in the arse.

‘Za isn’t a fan of gentrification; he feels like a lot of the communities he grew up in have had their souls ripped out,’ Gemma would say, smiling at her (usually white) friends, excusing her boyfriend’s very public rudeness as he tutted and swung on his chair in whichever formerly industrial brunch spot they were eating in that day. Gemma’s white friends always nodded, always conscious of their privilege, his greater experience and his fame, even as they shifted uneasily and wished he would stop. He knew it and he played to it.

His phone began pinging as the pictures uploaded, and he scrolled through them, suddenly greedy for his youth. Here it was. Here it all was. Working on that album with Clio, her big Robert Burns project, him trying to find the flow inside all those ancient Scots words, the two of them and her producer bent double laughing in the studio, the picture probably taken by one of the Scouse boys or her old uncle. A club night, both of them red-eyed from the flash, glitter from Clio’s makeup sending beams out into space. One shot of her striking a pose by the river, holding a pint of cider.

All of the best pictures, all of the times they’d wanted to snapshot and keep, were from around her album sessions. It was proper exciting, living inside her head at that time, watching how she steered the whole thing, worked with her collaborators, even just sitting there quietly at the back, watching as she found a weird, wonderful bit of a groove with one of the musicians, pushed it further, their excitement rising. It wasn’t his sort of music, but he knew then he wanted to make his own stuff in that way. For proper fucking joy, man. The sex at that time was amazing, too, him turned on by the brain on her, by what she could do, her by the same thing, probably.