He took off his hat and looked briefly around, his expression serious as a bird. He was struggling to tally the café with his recollection.

Dyer reminded him: ‘We used to sit against this wall in case Slimy spotted us.’

Rougetel flicked his glance through the glass pane to the passage.

‘But he never caught us, did he, Slimy?’ he murmured with a note of pride. ‘He’d have whacked us for sure.’

He went on staring at the window with a concentrated gaze as if it reflected back those years and the shadow of his younger head, the smells of Player’s cigarettes and fried bread. He smiled as if he was no longer afraid.

Those boundaries they had crossed at school, his smile seemed to say, they were rehearsals for future transgressions and explorations. Once you had played truant by going to the Lisboa or the St Giles Café, no place would ever feel off-limits again.

‘What do you want to eat?’ said Dyer.

Rougetel read his menu, but he was not seeing the dishes. The food had changed since he last sat opposite Dyer, possibly at this table, devouring a forbidden egg on toast (while explaining with a waxy face why he had taken the train on his own to Paddington). It wasn’t what he was used to.

‘Why don’t you choose for me?’ he said, and closed the menu.

Miguel returned. Dyer ordered two dishes of the day. The slow roast pork for himself, a vegetarian falafel for Rougetel, and apple juices for both.

Scraping forward his chair, Dyer bumped his knees against the table, dislodging the rod.

‘What’s this for?’ retrieving it from the floor.

Rougetel tipped his head. ‘In case I’m attacked.’

In a convulsive movement, he brought his arms up from his lap, stretched them out.

Dyer had forgotten how unexpected he could be.

He looked at the backs of Rougetel’s hands and saw that they were bruised: the mauve marks – like Ribena stains – still angry from where some drunks had stamped on his wrists two nights before, snarling ‘Vagrant!’ while he lay on the pavement outside Balliol, having fallen asleep. This was the first time he’d been assaulted. He normally slept in Iffley, he said.

Dyer fell silent. He didn’t know how Rougetel wanted him to react. There was a curious pleading expression in his face. It threaded Dyer’s glance back to the bathroom mirror in which their eyes had met, a floor that stank of disinfectant, a dormitory of pinch-faced boys who had buried Dyer’s model aeroplane in the sandpit, and the occasion when Rougetel, in a quiet serious voice, after Dyer thanked him for saying where the Boomerang was hidden, revealed that he came from Pluto, and Dyer wasn’t to tell.