‘Of course not!’ But after a moment she confessed. ‘I tried. But there were no seats. No sleepers either. Everyone’s going away for the school holidays. We got lucky – someone had returned their tickets five minutes before I got to the station.’ Minna reached across to fill up my glass and sploshed wine into our basket of bread. ‘We’ll be sitting up all night. Never mind, we’ll be with all the ang-ter-es-sung people.’

Judging by my trips to Paris, people who travelled without sleepers weren’t ang-ter-es-sung but short of money. I started writing Minna’s name on the cheque.

‘Please just tear up that fucking thing.’

‘I’m not going unless you let me pay.’

On the way home, leftover tension strolled between us. ‘I wish you’d let me buy you that ticket,’ Minna said. ‘We’re girls against the world, aren’t we? I want us to stick together, always.’

‘We are,’ I said. ‘We will.’ I took her wrist and sang backup for Lou Reed. ‘Doo … doo-doo … doo-doo … But sometimes,’ I went on, ‘the coloured girl wins.’

‘It’s not like I’m white white.’

We went on for a few paces. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘The French coined the word racisme. It meant anti-Semitism originally. White supremacists kill Jews, remember?’

We were wearing our windcheater dresses, pink and blue, the same and not the same. ‘They kill people like me for a different reason,’ I said. What I was thinking was, You’re not the one who’s asked to produce her papers at the flea market. Why couldn’t Minna see that? We walked on in silence. My jaw was aching – I realised that I was clenching my teeth. We passed a shop window filled with a green and gold dinner set. Only days before it had made us laugh until we grew weak.

‘Come and have five drinks with me,’ said Minna when we got to her street.

‘I’m teaching first thing.’

‘Don’t you know you’re supposed to wait till you’re thirty before you start drinking in moderation? You’ll be getting into gardening soon if you’re not careful.’

On the platform the next night, waiting for our train, she showed me a faint red mark on her wrist. ‘You did that.’

I picked up her hand with a flourish and kissed it, like Nick. White skin: how the bruises showed up.

In Genoa, where we got off the train the following morning, I made a joyful discovery: in Italy they ate pastries for breakfast. ‘Let’s stay here for the rest of our lives,’ I said.

We were in a cafe near the station. Minna’s hands were clasped around a thick white cup. She was drinking a cappuccino and expounding her view that to treat clothes like any other commodity was a fundamental Marxist mistake. ‘That’s because Marx was a man. Men think clothes are frivolous because women love them and love buying them. I’m going to tell John Berger that, straight up.’