There was no mention anywhere of sexual arousal occurring as a consequence of sleep paralysis, but I figured that if a correlation existed I wouldn’t find it in the kind of books they kept in the school library. In any case, the fact that I had made the connection and now was seeking confirmation of it through secondary reading meant that my sexuality was already shaping itself from those lucid nightmares. Until then, I’d thought of sex in an abstract way and figured out in my head which positions would prove most efficient. It’d seemed to me that a lot about sex wasn’t immediately obvious, but I didn’t feel any rush to find out. Now, I had suddenly become impatient, my whole body feverish each morning. Whatever it was, sex needed to happen soon. The school term was almost over and I thought that this might be my last chance. It was time for me to take action.

I lost my virginity easily and to a girl called Roxy. She wasn’t a virgin. I didn’t care. It made things better. I knew that Roxy wasn’t only sleeping with me. She slept with everyone – or that was what everyone said. It didn’t matter so long as she would do it with me, which she dutifully did. All I had to do was ask. In bed she was disciplined, despite her experience, or maybe because of it. She was surprisingly pliable. She handed her body over as though she fancied stepping out of it and I could borrow it until she needed it back. When I roughed her up she went slack and pink, her white chocolate bob all scuffed, bottom lip out of axis, like a sweet posh horse. The third time we did it, she asked me to slap her, so I did what she wanted. The crack of my palm as it made contact with her cheek returned me to my body.

After that, the paralysis stopped completely. Three months of complete bliss. The next autumn, Roxy joined the young cadets. She died in Afghanistan a few years later. It made the national papers and when I read the obituary I smiled, thinking of her fondly. She’d never mentioned wanting to join the army during the brief time we had been together, but in my head it made perfect sense. You might say my sexual initiation was a paradigmatic experience. I will always be grateful to Roxy: she was a girl who put her body on the line. Just my type.

It happened again, many years later. 2007: the year my mother died. It was the night after the funeral and Ruth had come back to my childhood flat with me. That was the only time I would take her, because I sold the flat shortly afterwards, and shortly after that they turned the building into a bingo palace. The life of the city ticks on at its own pace.