His door was ajar. This was not necessarily an invitation to chat: one of the charms and horrors of our house was that doors had to be wrenched into their doorframes, then lifted up until you heard the click of the bolt in the latch, a consequence of Brunswick being built on sinking ground.

Dan was lying on his bed and looking at his laptop. I stood there pressed up against the gap in the doorframe until he noticed me out the corner of his eye and jumped.

‘Hi,’ he said suspiciously.

‘Hi,’ I said.

I went in and sat on the bed. He went back to his laptop. I looked around the room at his books and plants and clothes, and the two green dressing gowns hung on hooks like dead green men. I knew so much about this room, where the bowl of silver coins was, and where he kept his antiretrovirals, and the dregs of his pouch. I knew which drawers were boring, full of irrelevant things, and which drawers might contain objects of benefit to me.

‘I need one more reason to come out tonight,’ I said.

He looked up from his laptop and once again peered at me, his favourite expression, curling the recipient in a cone of scrutiny.

‘So think of one,’ he said.

Then he went back to his weekend, his vacation from a working week I could not comprehend.

I was back in my room, lazing on the bed, when I heard his wardrobe open, and his footsteps descend, and the front door open, and the front door close.

I went and investigated. His nice new shoes, white and clean and puffy, were gone, which suggested he would not come home before going out for the evening. I went down into the courtyard and looked at his herbs. I lay on the bed and looked at the corner.

The obvious reason to go out was the onset of summer. It was November 30, the last day of spring, and summer was traditionally a time of public appearances and self-discoveries. Could I build a case against this? Not against the temperature, which was a fact of record, but against the need to humour it with summery behaviour. Like everybody, I spent twelve months of the year preparing for weather – I had no patience for the false belief that weather is dull, it was hard to think of anything more consequential – but it was disturbing to contemplate the way its implications might be used to influence behaviour. This time last year, a group of people at my uni had made fun of the Bureau of Meteorology for calling certain nights ‘oppressive’, this being one of the more innocuous instances of oppression and yet one of the only times the word was used by a government body. But, in a certain light, it was a reasonable judgement, given the expectation that summertime be fun.