Dan leaned back and assessed me, not the first time, not the last. It was the leaning back I liked. It made you feel respected one second, acutely small and laser-scrutinised the next.

‘That’s a toughie,’ he said. ‘Let’s come back to that.’

The next day, he sent me a listing for a rental house.

I moved to the city with the usual fears about what sex might do, and the usual hopes about what sex might do, and in the usual scenarios I was quickly disabused. I still did not like bodies and mouths, and I decided to blame my father and his outré number of girlfriends and wives, for letting a child spend his whole life reading novels in the corner and never making me use a straw that had been sucked by someone else. Dan blamed my personality. No one thought to blame the mouths.

My dad and current stepmum helped me move, but they did not like Dan, perhaps because he referred to them as ‘the wealthy industrialists’ (in our seaside town, they ran an ice-cream and juice shop). They were not much of a subject of discussion here in Brunswick, in the house that we did not end up getting from a rental agency, so impossible on student incomes that we barely tried, but inherited from someone Dan had met at Sircuit and broken up with before things could start to get not-nice.

We didn’t talk very much about Dan’s origins either; I knew only that his parents lived on the south side, very south, and he went over there on significant holidays, returning with embarrassment and money. It was dullsville, the muck of youth. It lay there, thick and sucking. It always seemed like we had lots of other things to say.

We watched random, crappy films on SBS and Kanopy about the insouciance of men and the realism of the French. We never became huggers, but we did become those people you always see on the couch at the back of the party, eyes gleaming at everyone, hands just about but not quite in each other’s pockets. When he got too messed up at parties, Dan hijacked the playlists and tried to make people dance to Cat Stevens’ ‘Father and Son’. When we had to be separated we made sarcastic faces, beaming unspoken thoughts into each other’s minds.

We were not the same person, never once. There could be no union. He deliberately ruined dates because a guy asked ‘PrEP or condoms?’ (like being poz and undetectable was barely an option), or because a guy said something that casually disparaged more feminine guys.

Dan once peered at me over a glass of wine and said, ‘All I want in this world is the satisfaction of knowing that we got the right to marry and then not even using it, because marriage sucks.’ He had once walked out of a date because a guy called it ‘our yes vote’. For Dan, the plebiscite was something ‘they’ had done – a complicated gift, with secret money, secret motives. ‘I can think of no better fate for the institution of marriage than annihilation,’ he said. He refused to acknowledge this position as extreme.