The hood came waggling up the pipe until at last I could look straight into its eyeholes, but saw no eyes. In a panic, I picked up the lamp base from beside my bed and hit at the thing inside the hood over and over again. Then suddenly the hood fell off and the stunned face beneath it, with blood running down in a rivulet from the forehead, was Big Jacky’s.

‘Aw, why did you do that to me, son?’ he said, in a voice soaked with an immensely soft and patient sorrow.

I couldn’t speak. My hands were trying to press his bleeding head back together and make it well, but none of it would work.

‘Why did you do that, son?’ he said again, sadly.

When I woke up, my face was wet. My heart was beating at a hundred miles an hour, like a starling’s ticker, and the sheets were damp with sweat.

How could you explain love and how it creeps up on you? How it slowly takes a grip, spreading across you like blight across an elm tree, shortening your breath, sneaking into your dreams, making your mouth suddenly foolish, ambushing your clumsy, stupid heart with stabs of jealousy and desire?

And how can you explain the illogicality of it: how you might say there’s a girl there, who is certainly beautiful, and intelligent, and amusing, and if she were to be flattened by a bus tomorrow I would be very sorry, of course, for the loss of a life, but not that sorry? And there’s a girl there who’s not strictly anything that I can really convey, except that first I saw her laughing in a way that something in me understood, and then I thought I might love her.

She started as a waitress in the restaurant, about two weeks after I got the job behind the bar. She didn’t talk to anyone much at first, because she was too busy trying to work everything out, with the managers shouting in one ear and Francis in the other.

She had thick dark, wavy hair that fell jaggedly on to her neck, as though she had taken a chop at it herself with the kitchen scissors. Pale skin, as pale as paper, and dark, watchful eyes. She was small and fine-boned, as if pieced together by an intelligent hand. At the beginning, she spoke to me only in drinks orders, and her name was Eve. The significance of her name wasn’t lost on me, since I had already started to weave meanings around her. Eve, I thought, the woman at the start of everything.

One day, I tried a joke.

‘Two small glasses of house white, a gin and tonic with ice and lemon, and a margarita,’ she said.