‘I hate my flat! Who’d want to live here? Would you? And I was so fucking lonely. He resisted me, of course; he was an honourable man, and so sodding dense, bless him. But I knew that if I stayed close to you I wouldn’t lose contact with him. Oh, there were other people, remember them? But I always ended up chucking them. I guess I was punishing them because they weren’t Greg. I knew that I’d have to bide my time and he would come to me in the end.’ Her voice softened. ‘And he did. After all those years, he did. That night at the Odeon …’

She sank into her memories. For a moment she’d forgotten I existed. It reminded me of that moment on the cliff with Greg, how his voice became as dreamy as hers. How I realised I was utterly irrelevant.

Azra said: ‘You’d had him all that time. It was my turn now.’ She said this in a matter-of-fact way, with a shrug of her bony shoulders.

Then she jumped up and joined me on the sofa. She put her arm around me and gave me a squeeze.

‘Look, darling, I still love you. This isn’t going to make any difference to anything, is it?’

I was too astonished to speak.

‘We’re peas in a pod,’ she said. ‘Crazy peas in a crazy pod. Your secret’s safe with me, sweetheart, you can trust me on that. Honest injun.’ She gazed at my breasts with a speculative look, as if she’d never seen them before, and started stroking one of them with her finger. ‘We’ll find a nice house and live together at the seaside and nobody will ever know.’ She grabbed my chin and turned my face to hers. ‘Give us a kiss,’ she crooned. ‘Say you forgive me. After all, I’ve forgiven you.’

And then she kissed me deeply, her thick tongue exploring my mouth, pressing against my teeth.

I sat, rigid in her arms. I was literally frozen with fear. What was she playing at?

I was wearing my old blue cotton dress. Azra pushed it up, yanked down my knickers and flung them onto the floor. And then her hand was busy between my legs, and she’d unzipped her jeans and thrust my hand into her own wiry bush.

It wasn’t rape, not really. But all sorts of thoughts swirled around my head as she got to work on me. I remembered her laughing about Japanese women with their silky pubic hair, not like our Brillo pads. Where had that woman gone?

What had happened to us?