When she left, she reached up to his ear on tiptoe, and whispered that she would be in the pub at the end of the street until closing. He rushed through the next hour, whisking away plates the second the last mouthful had gone in, and traded till duty for two nights of doing the bins with Aftan. She was sitting up at the bar facing the door, dandling a straw in her drink, her legs crossed towards him, an invitation. From the pub to her bedsit round the corner was just mouths and hands and the noise of her breath in his ear and the bloodrush of knowing that it was happening so, so soon.

Long hot nights, lying on that cheapy foam mattress, sticky and stoned from sex, unwilling to sleep while the other one was still there. Her fingers dancing slow circles round his flaccid cock as she told him about Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, the radical, jumped up to play him snatches of folk songs and they both laughed at the women with their strange, too-serious fluty voices. He lent her his iPod, tucked the buds into her ears, played her Dizzee and Wiley and tried to make her realize what he wanted to do with himself.

It was a while before Clio took him seriously, he knew that. The second time they slept together, and he told her how old he was, she shrilled out one high note of a laugh and balled her fist into her mouth.

‘Darlin. I am fifteen years older than you. Fifteen. If someone had got me knocked up at school I could be your mammy. I actually went to school with a girl who’s got a kid your age. Jesus.’

‘Yeah, but int there a thing about sexual prime, though? Like, I read it somewhere that the ideal age for men and women to fuck is twenty-two and thirty-seven. Those are the prime ages. Best possible models of who they could be sexually.’

‘Oh really. You read that, did you? Those very ages?’

‘Yeah. Well I mean I don’t remember the exact specifics. Evidence seems to stack up, though, know what I’m saying?’

And he rolled her over and they lost themselves in skin and sweat again. All he had to do was keep coming back, turning up at the door after his shifts, staying the night, making her breakfast, and eventually she got used to him. In that first year, he would catch her on the occasional low point; they’d be getting ready to go out and he’d see her fretting her fingers together, her movements becoming jerkier as she paced in front of the mirror.

‘Oh, what are we doing. What am I doing. This is stupid. Hamza, wouldn’t you rather be out with someone your own age? Maybe with a smooth forehead and perky tits? Some little skinny babelet?’