They didn’t talk for two weeks. Then he turned up at her flat early on a Sunday morning, having stayed up all night to make a new track. She answered the door wrapped in a towel, her hair falling down her back. He opened the towel and pushed her back on to the bed without saying a word. Afterwards, he pulled out the iPod again.

‘I’m not saying you was right, OK? Shouting your mouth off still fucking dangerous if you look like me. But I had a think about what you said, and I tried to do something that might make you believe in me a bit more. Just, also, making it funny. Know what I’m saying?’

The track he played her was the rough version of ‘Hearing Me (Rising Up)’, which was the first single he managed to get on Rinse FM.

XANTHE

Santorini, 2012

Xanthe’s fingers fumbled at the stone, easing it out of its sheath. The wind rushed her, throwing up her skirts and spraying a tangle of hair into her mouth. It tasted stale, grubby: she would need a proper wash soon. Something sharp on the rock face tore at her forefinger and she let the gust take her curses.

All this for a cigarette.

For the last couple of years she had always kept a packet hidden in this crevice, midway up the staircase hacked out of the cliff between the beach and the studio. Actual cigarettes, in a plastic-wrapped box, with a neat, machine-folded foil wrapper, the ugly Cyrillic health warnings. The pleasure of their order in the carton, their uniformity; when lit, the chemical sweetness of the first pull. That gorgeous toxicity. She inhaled, heard the crackling draw burn down, watched the glowing tip and then exhaled out into the huge blue Aegean in front of her.

It usually took her about a year to get through a packet, because the circumstances had to be right. Nikolas had to be safely away, for at least a couple of hours. There could be no guests staying in the apartments, in case they wandered down to the beach, saw her and brought it up in front of Nikolas; just casually asked for a light or something. Finally, she had to be angry enough with Nikolas to want to reject everything about his ethos and the way of life they’d built together, just for the length of time it took to smoke.