I thought of buying Eve some chocolates, but then I remembered that I was probably someone she would prefer to forget. I had a sudden picture of Eve’s mum energetically lecturing her about getting involved with yet another bad bet, while Eve stared at the floor. I hadn’t met Eve’s mum yet, but Eve had told her about me on the way to the agonies of a formal introduction.

Still, there was a whole other reality out there, in which men washed the car on Sundays and talked passionately about the wisdom of upgrading their sound system. And they never seemed to question what the point of it all was – or did they, now and then when they had time to think?

When I watched television alone, once or twice a week when the Whartons finally trundled out for a few drinks, the feeling would come to me during the advertisements that I was an alien in this society. I began ignoring the programmes, but I couldn’t stop watching the ads, flicking back and forth between them like a spy absorbing the mysterious rules of another country. I was trying to work out how the wider world thought people ought to behave: innocently greedy for ever more stuff, it seemed, eager to inspire envy, touchingly exhilarated by a successful white wash at a low temperature. When I heard the Whartons fumbling at the door, I would quickly turn over and pretend I’d been engrossed in a film.

And what do you do if none of it applies to you: if you happen to look really odd – which I didn’t at least, apart from a few scars – or there is just never anyone in an advertisement who lives even slightly the way you live, an adult orphan renting a single room with a funny old couple who like the television on too loud?

Books didn’t make me feel the same way television did, and I read all the time, up there in the bedroom with the rain spattering on the windowpane and the distant hum of noise from two storeys down. There were plenty of men in books who lived at least a little bit like me, and even seemed to feel the way I did some of the time – drifting and half meaningless – men like that fella in The Stranger by Camus or Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Once I had that thought, I immediately regretted it and wanted to chop it down as if it had never come sauntering into my mind, because the thing that those characters had in common of course was that they ended up murdering someone.