‘Don’t worry,’ I say. He was always accident prone. Always hitting his head on the door frame of his houseboat or cracking his shins on the side of the tables in the pub as he wound his way up to the front to do really bad karaoke to really bad power ballads. He grins at me. I want him to go away. I don’t want to see his face because his face – his smile, the way his eyes crinkle when he laughs and the lines at the side of his mouth join in; that chickenpox scar I want to touch with my finger and smooth away – is what I love about him most of all.

‘Are you still working at the conference centre?’ he asks. He is leaning against the wall, feet crossed at the ankles. Relaxed. How can he always be so relaxed? I am a tightly wound spring, ready to unravel.

I hesitate. I really don’t want to come across as a total loser. Not to this man. A man who I mostly met at night but who I always viewed as someone who walks on the sunny side of the street; who belongs on the sunny side of life … I got made redundant not long after I decided I couldn’t have him in my life any more. When my heart was still breaking at the thought of never seeing him again, I was called into my own office and told I had managed so effectively and set up such a brilliant system, for all the tiers of staff below me, that I was no longer required.

‘Prue’s been looking after me,’ says Dad and he settles back in his chair.

‘Oh, right. Right,’ says Kemp. ‘That’s excellent.’

After the night in Camden, Kemp took my number and he used to call me, about six o’clock, when I was on my way home from work, to ask me if I wanted to go to the pub. We’d meet in the tiny King’s Arms near his houseboat, we’d drink too many Jack Daniel’s and Cokes and eat salt-and-vinegar crisps and talk and talk and talk, and then we’d stagger, laughing usually to one of those recycled jokes of his he could never quite reach the punchline of, back to Summer Breeze and talk and drink more bourbon and talk and drink more bourbon. I found out he really did have a cat on elastic. That his mum was a hoarder and his dad an escapee jigsaw doer. That he slept, as a child, in a box room crammed with old magazines and plastic tubs rammed full of tat, and that his roaming the world as a photographer was his own escape, making up for the confines of his childhood. That he got into photography in the first place as a means to literally see beyond his stuffed and chaotic home life.