There she was. Her face in tiny squares, mostly much younger than he’d ever known her. Holding her guitar. Onstage at a rally, with her fist in the air. Videos of what he knew was her stoned grin as she flashed her T-shirt on Top of the Pops, those five seconds before the camera cut repeating for ever. A drunken candid shot posted by some indiscreet cunt, jaw squint, blurry hair and a cigarette falling out of her hand. There was one they were using a lot – Clio at a microphone, in close-up, black and white. Her eyes were shut and lined in black, her mouth was open and dark. She was singing and she was lost in it. It was impossible to tell how old she was, whether that was before or after him. Or during. Sometimes these anonymous people, out there on Instagram, put washes or filters over it, or graphics with their own comments: #peoplegottariseup, over and over again.

He scrolled into the cloud, began zooming through the years of pictures stored there – him and Gemma in Ibiza, him and Gemma the day they got Snoop, taking selfies with the puppy. He wasn’t even sure he’d migrated all his photos over from the old laptop. Even the earliest ones were all of Gemma, started in 2013.

Had he known Clio better than anyone else? For a time, maybe. To be that person, though, that was a big responsibility, and here he was having fucked it. A nice fucking send-off, he thought, if the person who knew you best in the world, for a time, couldn’t remember you properly.

He mooched about in the garden with a joint for a bit, started wondering half-paranoid whether there was some conspiracy going on, if even the computer was in on it. What kind of man you think you is anyway, he asked himself, out loud, if you need pictures and videos and the fucking cloud to keep your memories for you? Of a relationship that ended less than ten years ago? Fucking machines are winning, he muttered to Gemma’s three-hundred-quid garden chair. Fucking machines are coming for us.

Flash. Clio in the bath in the shared bathroom of the bedsit, knees pulled up in front of her chest, smiling at him, reaching out to wrap a wet hand round his neck. There were never any words, though. Her mouth was moving but he couldn’t hear her voice.

He hadn’t bothered to open the blinds in the office and the effect, when he stepped back, looked a bit serial killer, he had to admit. There were boxes all over the floor, tipped on their side and their contents emptied out, the drawers in the desk hanging open, the shelves bare and shoved around. It was like she’d been scrubbed out of his life. No letters, no mementos, nothing. Had he done this? Had Gemma?