Cut to me kneeling in front of him, examining his cock through a pair of pince-nez, giving it the big thumbs-up. God, Polly, stop it.

He was looking at the table. There were two largish folded pieces of paper on it. Maybe they were maps to hidden treasure and we’d find it together and I’d be minted and could stab the student loan people in the eyes with rolled-up fifties.

They weren’t maps. They were drawings. Studies in fine black pen of birds’ wings. On one, individual wings were isolated as if floating in a pale sky, dense shading for the shorter feathers, the strokes whisper-thin. The other showed a bird in flight viewed from the back, its long wings outstretched. Underneath it were sketchier versions of separate parts of the same bird – a whole underside of feathers, a single one, a tuft of tail, and the whole bird again in a few simple lines, like a wooden frame.

I thought of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of flying machines and mills and tanks. It was as if Jim were inventing a bird for the first time. As if birds didn’t yet exist.

‘I just like to know how they work.’ He sounded guarded.

‘You’re really good.’ He didn’t say anything, just took a step to the side, still in the open doorway, and back again. ‘Did you train as an artist, then?’

‘No. Just – started.’ He took his woolly hat off. ‘Kept doing it.’

I chucked a grin his way. ‘Wanna draw me?’

‘I don’t do people.’ His hair was sticking up, a raven who’d just shaken itself out after falling headfirst into a puddle.

‘Why not? I bet you’d be good.’

He pushed himself off the door frame. ‘People move.’ It wasn’t said unkindly.

‘I can stay still.’

‘Oh, aye,’ he said, as if I’d just announced that I was the Queen or had been to the moon, and put the kettle on.

A deer skull rested on one windowsill, the antlers asymmetrically curving upwards, tips pointy enough to pick your teeth with. I thought of the deer I’d found on the road coming back to life, fur appearing over the bone, its graceful dancer legs and peat-brown eyes.

Jim cleared his throat behind me. ‘Got you something.’ He nodded vaguely at the table again.

I hadn’t looked any further than the drawings. There was a pile of damp old newspapers that had fused together. A large pair of rusty scissors. An empty milk carton. A pipe.

I picked it up. It had a horizontal stripe around the well, which was a rich brown-red, its bottom deliberately pockmarked. A straight neck and a black mouthpiece that curved downwards.

‘For the mozzies.’ He had a hand on the back of his neck and was looking somewhere near my knees.

‘Did you make it?’

‘No.’

He’d gone to a shop and actually bought me something. I clamped the pipe between my teeth and chomped on it, jutting my lower jaw out, Popeye-style. Jim gave a slow grin.