Thus did the early morning find them, a cubist painting, Stanley imagined, of two newly formed lovers, unclothed bodies divided into segments of browns, the geometry of dismembered planes.

One of his thighs placed at right angles over a cylindrical calf, his stomach a bronze disc, perfectly knotted navel at his hub, her conical breast eclipsed by a disembodied hand.

Her plaits swept into a fan of black spokes, to startling effect on the white sheet, as if an artist had laid them out that way, so peacefully, so symmetrically.

As he lay watching Jessie sleep, she opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling.

‘William,’ she said, her voice eerie, strangely olde-worlde.

Now who in God’s name was William, Stanley wondered. One of Jessie’s exs? He wasn’t used to these jolts. He was used to predicting his emotional journey through any given day, yes, like a good old Roman road. Since he’d met Jessie he’d already been up the Himalayas and through the Khyber Pass. What next? White-water rafting in Jamaica?

Stanley sat up and watched as Jessie climbed over the mattress, seemingly without the weight of bone, muscle, organ or water, a sleepwalker with a fulness of purpose. Reaching the window, she gravitated towards the shadows, where she appeared to morph into someone else:

A certain Lucy Negro, standing

in her tumbledown lodgings in Clerken-well,

looking down at the hawkers and dummerers

whom she knows only too well,

like Eileen ‘Evil Eye’ Wilson, applying ratsbane

on to her corpulent chest and flaccid arms,

the better to raise odious sores,

the better to make herself a pitiful beggar,

Lucy’s madam when she first arrived in the city.

There go the pottle-pot and vintner boys –

Grocer Markham’s grandson Arthure,

barrel perched atop his head, back sunk low

over speeding, ricket-bowed legs.

Young Eddie, Widow Sexton’s slave boy,

two caskets in outstretched arms, told

to run faster than a whipped horse

and barely seven years old at that.

There goes slithering Lord Etherington,

sniffing out the alleyway skirts he lifts weekly,

nose so lofty he steps first into a dark

coil of dog’s shit, then a paler, colder porridge

of human excrement, whereupon he ends

up squashed in a goodly dollop of both,

creasing the whole street up with mirth,

a whole street’s worth of sneering, sore-addled lips,

a whole street’s worth of gunge-curdled teeth.

And there the purveyors of the oldest trade,

Maude, Mags, Polly, Kat, Thomasina,

Lucy’s colleagues all and on frequent occasions

her opponents in spectacular cat fights,

mucus entangled in fistfuls of flying hair,

which she is always odds-on favourite to win.

There, down stage right, stands Lucy,

looking down on life, as she knows it.