‘Yeah,’ he says. Yeah, and in one smooth moment Salvi is raising his arm and hailing a cab that isn’t there, but suddenly there is one and it’s sailing down the road like a ship with its yellow light on top and it is pulling up to the kerb and I am being ushered in and Salvi is saying ‘See you’ and he shuts the door on me – the sliding door – with a clunk, well, it’s a really stiff door and it takes three goes until he finally gets rid of me, and I find myself sitting like a small child in the back seat, small and small and small with disappointment, and the taxi pulls away and I see Salvi’s face staring at me, from the night, his hand half-raised in an approximation of goodbye.

CHAPTER 18

Why are men never who you expect them to be? Why is there always something to trip you up or bring you down or leave you crying in the night? Why do you always have to be so very very careful?

I don’t cry in the night over the fact that one minute Salvi and I were kissing on the street, the next I was in a taxi, alone, going home. I arrive home to find the lights off and Dad already retired for the night, and I take off my make-up and I put Savlon on my birthmark and I go to bed. Salvi kissed me, then he had to go. It was abrupt, it was incredibly disappointing, and it was startling, but it wasn’t terrible. I’ve had terrible.

I’ve had really terrible.

Why does that other man come into my head now? That other man who hurt me? That stranger, in Tenerife? I lie in bed and watch the colours of a London night alight on my window then disappear, in a moving slide show. Why do I allow him to haunt my dreams, both awake and asleep?

I place a pillow over my head and block out the light, but it cannot block out everything. I’ve only ever told the story to one person – well, some of it, I don’t even know how much – and I shouldn’t have said anything, as I was tainted enough already and it was hardly a story that would make Kemp, my friend, fall in love with me. Why do I even continue to tell myself the story of what happened in the summer of 1996, in Tenerife? It was just a work trip. It was just a work trip to teach a badging system to a hotel on the coast.