Annie was his friend Johnny’s girlfriend. She had really long, shiny dark hair and she always wore the same trainers: white ones with really thick soles. She had four earrings in each ear, and a nose ring, and she worked all day in a little studio where she made these tiny white pots with black polka dots on them. Once he and Johnny had gone to meet her at her studio, which she shared with all these other people who wore dungarees and colourful scarves in their hair. Annie had white residue from the clay smeared all over her face, and she showed Jack this long, skinny pot she was making; it was a vase for her friend’s birthday. She had gone to the pub with the white on her face, even though Johnny had laughed at her and told her she looked like a painter and decorator. She drank pints of cider, smoked roll-ups and lived in Deptford in a property guardianship that was an old school. None of the residents had their own rooms, they just had bits of tarpaulin dividing up one big room. They had a big sheet in the kitchen with a rota for doing the cooking. Everyone was a vegan. Jack didn’t think he’d have liked living there, but Annie said it was really fun – and she only paid £300 a month, which was really good for London.

Once, Jack had gone to a party there with Johnny and had eaten a hash brownie and started feeling rather peculiar, like his lungs were breathing inside out. He’d been walking around the party, lights strobing a little, but then – by a stroke of luck – he’d seen Annie. He’d told her what had happened. He’d laughed, although he was also scared of the way it felt, as if his brain was rolling like a tide, but Annie had grabbed his hand, led him outside to the small stone wall that ran through the old schoolyard, and sat there outside with him for an hour. She’d rolled him cigarettes and told him all about the people she lived with. Some of them were in a poly couple, which meant – or so it appeared to Jack – that they had relationships with several people, both men and women, at the same time. Annie said the noise didn’t really bother her that much – plus, when they were having a proper sex party she just arranged to stay round Johnny’s. Jack had looked at her, wide-eyed, when she’d told him this, and she’d laughed. ‘I thought you were from Manchester? Aren’t you meant to be cool?’ Listening to Annie had calmed him down, and after a while his brain had stopped doing backflips.