Sometimes a voice or a gesture makes me think of Minna – I see her pigtails or her whispery orange coat. They pass through my mind in an instant, carried on a strip of ice-blue light. Did Nick tell her about us? Sitting on a grave, he said that he’d filled two suitcases with Minna’s clothes and left them in the street, along with her sewing machine. It wasn’t the striped voice but one that was tired and pitiless. Nick married a short, intelligent, chivalrous, tender girl who dreamed of providing Africans with clean drinking water or saving an endangered rodent, but who settled for a corner office. Nick made her happy in bed and uneasy everywhere else. Those are delusions. I never heard from him again. The one I miss is Minna. She taught me that hot pink is really a neutral. She taught me to show my face.

In the summer of 1983 I was in Paris doing research. One night I turned on the radio, and Klaus Nomi was singing ‘Total Eclipse’. When the song ended, the DJ announced that Nomi had died. Hushed, jittery talk was going on everywhere about an illness that was killing gay men. Dieter and I had exchanged a few postcards, but it was months since we’d been in touch. My time in Montpellier already felt so remote that it seemed to belong to a book I’d once read. In the apartment opposite mine a baby was screaming. Its parents were holding a dinner party on their terrace and ignoring it. A sensation of cold made the hair float up along my arms. Dieter was dying – the baby seemed to confirm it, crying by itself in the dark. The next day I called the Berlin number I had, but the woman who answered had never heard of Dieter.

At this distance the pictures of Lucio that I hold in my mind merge with those of Nick. A lanky man slouches contented against my bolster. He has ears like flowers – which one is he? It was definitely Lucio who bought me tulips. He said that their purply-pink openness reminded him of my fica. Whenever I see that shade of pink it’s raining, Lucio is inside me, if I turn my head I can see a jug of tulips and a buttery plate.