‘I’ll call you,’ he says, and I feel suddenly foolish and think, Yeah right. Just because Dad has been asking me to open my eyes to the world and its possibilities and I opened them and he was there, it doesn’t mean he is going to call me. Just because I quite fancy him doesn’t make him a man standing in what’s left of my future, smiling on some kind of shimmering horizon. I fell prey to thinking that once – that there could be a man who held my happiness in his hand, like a throbbing heart. There wasn’t.

As Dad and I walk away, his hand on my arm, I can still feel Salvi watching, those eyes boring into my back. We walk through the multiplied crowds, back past the silent human statues painted gold and silver and bronze, as the revived early-afternoon sun dries rainwater shallows on the cobbles and translucent speckles on shop windows. Dad’s cane is suddenly magical: crowds part as it taps its path.

‘I enjoyed that,’ he says.

‘Me too,’ I say, ‘apart from landing face up in the gutter.’

‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,’ say Dad.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘Oscar Wilde.’

‘It was fun,’ he adds. ‘Fun is something I wasn’t sure I’d ever have again … you know?’

‘I know, Dad.’

Dad has basked in the sun and been funny and found things funny and I have taken part in a street performance with all eyes on me, and while I was lying in the gutter I looked up and saw Salvi. I can enjoy a little bit of hope, can’t I? I can imagine there might be a shimmering horizon, somewhere, one day, for me … That there is light and there are stars, with my name on them. And if that horizon and those stars dissolve to nothing, as they inevitably will, can’t I enjoy this moment, when they are the flicker of a possibility?

‘Are we nearly there?’ asks Dad.

‘Where, Dad?’

‘The tube station?’

‘Yes, we’re here now.’