A taxi is waiting outside like another small miracle on this miraculous night. Salvi opens the back door for me and I slip inside, on to the back seat; the windows are open and the night is coming in. Let everything in. I think. I want to be flooded with light and life until there’s no room for any more. Salvi jumps in after me, plomps on the seat, leans forward and thunks the sliding door closed. He turns to me and takes my face in his hands, both hands, cupped round my face, and starts kissing me again. I press my breasts into his warm chest. My heart into his body. And as the taxi putters into a sprint, past another green set of traffic lights, another of my black spots turns light and dances off into the night.

CHAPTER 24

When I was about nine or ten, Angela and I went to stay with Nonna and Papa in a caravan somewhere near the white cliffs of Dover for the summer holidays and Nonna gave me an annual – I think it was Bunty – and I was obsessed with one of the comic-strip stories in it, reading it over and over, until, if someone had asked me to reproduce it, word by word and picture by picture, I could have done. It was about a young girl with blonde hair who had a hideous scar under her right eye which distorted that side of her face, and she was teased and taunted because of it, mercilessly. She cried every night, so one day she bought a mask – a black eye mask, a bit like Zorro’s – and she ran away into the country and lived rough, like a gypsy, whilst wearing it; always. She had all sorts of adventures and forgot about her face, for many years, until one day the mask came off in one of her adventures and she happened to look into the reflection of a pond in the moonlight and she was beautiful. Just beautiful. I stared at that final panel of the story for ever. I wished so hard that this sequence of events – this story, told in black and white, in illustrations and speech bubbles – would happen to me. I wished and I wished and I wished, and of course it never did, but this morning, just a little, I feel like the girl in the final panel.

The scene is Salvi’s flat. His open-plan sitting-room-slash-kitchen. One single corner lamp is still switched on. Two half-drained wine glasses and an empty bottle of red sit on a trendy glass coffee table. And I am sitting on a high stool in one of Salvi’s T-shirts while he’s in the shower, and I’m drinking strong black coffee he has made in an actual cafetière, with my hair all tousled and half over my face and a big thumping headache.