The sun came out as we were leaving, cool autumn sun. It fell on the stout, piebald body of the South American tapir that was standing in an oasis of green grass, peacefully rooting in the soft ground with a head that tapered to a long, elegantly questing snout. I couldn’t get over the strangeness of him. He was a joke and a miracle rolled into one, a patchwork pig stitched to an anteater. The more I looked at him, the more I started to laugh: not in mockery, but in a kind of amazement. I looked at Raymond, and he was laughing too. ‘Look at him,’ I said. ‘Isn’t he mad?’

‘Yes,’ said Raymond, his face contorted with happiness. I was happy too.

The moment you start loving someone, it frightens you: it’s not just what they might do to you, but what you might do to them. I loved Eve, and now I was starting to love Raymond. But what was I? A barman, on not much of a wage, with a body full of scars and twinges and lies and a home I couldn’t go back to. I could sense my own precariousness, and I was getting vertigo. They were two innocents who had invested their faith in me, and I was a con artist. I had walked towards both of them masquerading as a solution, but I was lugging a suitcase full of problems.

I had come to London by accident, only to escape. It had just been a stop-off on a flight to somewhere else; I didn’t know whether I really wanted to stay there. What was there in London for me, but a room in a bedsit and a lifetime mixing gin-and-tonics for pink-faced businessmen? I saw my future stretching out, the marathon evenings of the oldest barman in the big city. The thought of moving on filled me with exhilaration and sorrow.

Raymond asked Eve questions about me now, wanting to know when I would be coming round to their flat. That pleased me as much as it worried me. I feared disappointing him. More than anything, I feared becoming an echo of his idiot father, the boyfriend who had run off to Canada when Raymond was one.

The thought of that boyfriend bothered me. He was there, constantly knocking on a door I struggled to keep closed, leading to thoughts I didn’t want to entertain. I couldn’t understand how he could have left her, when I thought she was so perfect. Had he just been a fool, or was there something lurking in Eve that had slowly driven him away, something I hadn’t yet seen? This was a cheap way for me to think, I could see that. They had been very young when Raymond was born, after all, and people left each other for all sorts of reasons.