My hand missed the railing and then I was outside, frozen at the top of the stairs. There was a small mob ahead of me. They had signs: one said Free Hugs. I didn’t see the others because stood in front of the sign was Neil. He had his back to me but there he was, his stubbly skull, his bald spot visible, the mandarin collar of his cheesecloth shirt. Was this the commune he’d been talking about? A suit jacket was slung across his shoulders, and he had a briefcase, as if he’d just come out of work. I picked out a woman, standing quite near him, striking a rhythm on a bottle with a wooden stick, bells around her wrists. Large and shabby and blonde, braless breasts hanging low. I wondered what her face looked like when she and Neil fucked. I imagined she’d have a very serene expression. I know what his looks like. Something rose in my chest and I pulled together the creases of my coat, knitted my fingers in my scarf as the cold pierced my throat. I couldn’t stop looking at him.

‘What are his new friends like, then?’ says my mother.

‘They don’t believe in private property,’ I say. We begin to shred the chicken breast into strips, distinct sections of fewer and fewer meat fibres.

‘They never eat meat,’ I say. I nod at the chicken. Technically, neither do we.

‘Not even chicken?’ my mother asks.

‘Not even chicken,’ I say.

We each take a new piece of kitchen roll from the pre-torn pile on the table. We set the used one to the side, the clean one in front. We arrange the chicken bunches on the new napkin in parallel lines. A tally.

‘You’re holding up the queue,’ a woman said behind me. I stepped to the side and into the paperman. He shouted in my ear, ‘Evening Standard,’ and my mouth tasted sour. The football kit formation in the window of Nike Town stood like a firing squad. I took another step on to the foot of a different woman. There was a small commotion.

‘I think he saw me,’ I say.

Fingerpicking through our fish-shaped bowls, we pair the coleslaw with the chicken: one piece of cabbage, one piece of chicken, one piece of carrot, one piece of chicken, one piece of cabbage.

When Neil turned to face me, my breath collected in a pool at the bottom of my throat. He stared in my direction. Next to him, the blonde woman produced the unnerving noise. She didn’t acknowledge him. Nor he her. They didn’t know each other. So what was he doing there? He was staring right in my direction, towards where I stood at the mouth of the station. Why wasn’t he doing anything? There were no hippie friends, no commune. He had lied about that too.