I didn’t really know Kemp at school. I mean, we were in the same art class, for GCSEs, but despite being generally smiley and quite bouncy, he was an enigma. A loner. He was always in the darkroom, emerging like an abashed vole with his shaggy New Romantic hair all messed up and a grin both joyous and sheepish, smelling of those weird chemicals and clutching photograph after photograph he had developed: people, buildings, animals, landscapes; everything. Colour, black-and-white, sepia. Not that I was watching.

He didn’t seem to have any particular friends. There was one boy – David somebody – a peer-besmirched ‘speccy runt’, who he hung around with a lot but who moved away in the third year. Then there was just Kemp and his darkroom. I heard Kemp’s mum was a hoarder, the sort they make programmes about now, and his dad an obsessive jigsaw doer, in a summerhouse at the bottom of the garden. That they had a cat they only allowed out on a piece of elastic, which stretched as far as that summerhouse and no further. No one really knew for sure, but it stopped him being popular. It deterred girls from finding him good-looking. His smiles were declared creepy and his bounciness viewed with suspicion. He had a cat on elastic.

I was not an enigma. I was viewed not with suspicion but with contempt. I was an ugly non-entity who did straight-up drawing, still life, painting onions and things. And I didn’t see Kemp for many years, after we left school. Then one day in my early twenties, not long before I got my first job at the conference centre, I bumped into him when I was waiting in a lay-by for Dave, the man in a blue van who picked me up every morning when we worked together going around pubs and leisure centres collecting cash from vending machines. Sheryl Crow wrote a song about a vending machine repairman once; in the song he picked her up when she was hitch-hiking and it was quirky and cool – he had a daughter named Easter and was surprisingly intellectual. Riding in the van with Dave was far from that. He ate stinky pasties, played Westlife CDs and had a daughter called Big Stacey. Anyway, one morning there was a whistle – not a wolf whistle but a ‘Lookee here!’ kind of whistle – and Kemp from school came bounding towards me. I’d just told a couple of giggling teenagers – identikit Impulse body spray and frosted-pink lipstick – who were giggling at my face from a nearby bus stop to ‘Piss off!’

‘Do you need any help?’ he asked me.

‘No, I’ve dispatched them, thanks,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Good for you. Haverstock Comprehensive, right? Art class?’

‘Yeah.’