There was a silence while I stared uselessly at my futile shoes, with their veneer of city dirt. Then she thought for a while. She would come and see it anyway, she said: she would telephone her mother and ask her to look after Raymond for the evening.

Our shifts ended at six. It was a dry night, but crisply cold, and we were both wearing our winter coats. Her thin shoulders sloped under the heavy cloth, and an arc of her pale neck was exposed where the wind lifted up her dark hair. When we were walking down the street, navigating the crowds, I took her arm in mine. She turned towards me for a moment, with a question in her brown eyes. I looked back at her. Then she turned forward again and we carried on walking down the street, arm in arm.

In the cinema I reached for her hand, as we sat in the darkness and watched the thwarted architect build a teetering scale model of Notre-Dame cathedral out of empty packets of antidepressants. After he fixed on its clumsy spire, he raised his fists and pounded them in frustration against the asylum walls. It was a strange and slow-moving film, but nothing about that evening was boring to me. Her hand lay still and cool in my hand, like a sleeping bird.

Life had battered Eve a little bit already. Well, that was all right; life had battered me. I liked that about her. She had learned that happiness wasn’t a right, you had to try and make some of it yourself. She didn’t expect me to sweep her up on a white charger and carry her off to a big house with hot and cold running money flowing from gold taps, its rooms swarming with laughing, photogenic children. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have. She just wanted me to love her, but she was suspicious of love, and therefore of me: she came towards me jumpily, like an animal that was once pelted with grit and hasn’t forgotten the sting. Sometimes when she forgot to be suspicious and I forgot to be secretive, I was happier with her than I had ever been before in my life.

She wouldn’t let me stay with her when Raymond was in her place, a square two-bedroom council flat in a block in King’s Cross. It would confuse him, she said, and he had had enough of that already. But on the nights when he went to her mother’s we would lie folded together in the dark, whispering to each other and doing other things too without my old urge to escape afterwards, but only to stay there always.