‘Jesus. I’m really sorry. He never does that. You never do that.’ I dumped Tyger on the floor. He looked at me like I’d just told him that my heart lay with another dog.

‘Ah, never mind. Perhaps he doesn’t think my coat has enough holes in it already.’ He plucked at a small, frayed tear on his sleeve.

‘I’m really sorry. Say sorry.’ I prodded Tyger with my toe. He turned away from me with very deliberate, shuffling motions and lay down, his head just past the paving stone, raindrops landing on his nose.

I took the baccy out of my pocket. ‘Um, do you want one?’

He turned to me again, the colour on his cheek no less startling closer up. There was a large, dark mole in the middle of it, a black hole in a molten-red galaxy. ‘That seems like a rather fine deal on my part.’

I shrugged and began rolling him one. Apart from the tear in his coat, he was impeccably dressed again, a sort of catalogue model for retired eccentrics – coils of dirty grey hair coming out of a green beret, checked shirt-collar, pale pink tie, mac. His shoes were super polished, though maybe that was just the weather again. Everything here looked buffed and brass-rubbed, all of the time.

We watched the rain bounce as it hit the pavement and the roofs of the few parked cars. My jacket was still stuck to my arms.

‘Does it ever stop?’ I said.

‘When you least expect it.’ He stubbed his cigarette out under a pointed toe that moved like Fred Astaire’s. ‘If the rain’s what you meant.’

I glanced at him. ‘Maybe.’

‘Ah, don’t blame the rain on your troubles. It just doesn’t know how to fall upwards.’ He clapped his hands and picked up his shopping bag. ‘Right my dear, no point standing round here all day.’ He whisked a huge golf umbrella from the corner by the door of the shop.

‘Is that yours?’

He winked at me. ‘Let’s say so.’

His name was Johnny and the spiky gold badge on his beret was for the Scots Guards – or The Kiddies, he said, with a flamboyant sort of affection. He told me about the Persian Gulf, his first posting, wide dry skies and palm trees and no women anywhere. And other places, too – he’d been all over. How the hairs pricked up on the back of your neck in alleyways in Belfast. Football games and their own radio station in West Germany. But he’d been back here a long old time, he said, since his leg had been damaged in a training exercise in Hong Kong.

‘I’d only just stepped off that godforsaken boat.’ It was as if the water had plumped up his voice as well as every inch of soil round here. He seemed to enjoy the sound and taste and smell of every word, rolling it around in his mouth like hefty swills of Rioja.