In the bathroom there was a glint coming off the glass shelf over the sink, and I reached for it, but instead of a perfume bottle I touched something like tinfoil that rustled at my fingertips. I reached up higher and tugged the cord of the shaving light. It sprang on, horribly bright, and I saw how the glass shelf was covered in empty foil blister packs. Some of them had fallen off into the sink. The bottle of perfume, a tall thin cone of frosted glass, stood right at the shelf’s end, with something Japanese printed on it and a silver atomiser at the top. The plastic tube that fed the atomiser only just touched the last drop of perfume left in the base of the glass. I carried the bottle to the Englishman and put it in his hands as if he was blind.

‘There’s a girl, there’s a girl,’ he said. ‘That’s the one. But you take it. You spray a bit – just there, on your wrist. You’ll like the smell. It’s a beautiful smell.’

I knew it was wrong of him to ask me. It was wrong of me to have stayed this long already. I was troubled by the empty packets in the bathroom, by the whisky, by the slackness of his face.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d better not.’

‘Just a little test,’ he said. ‘Like in the shops. You like to try the perfumes out, don’t you?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Please? Please.’ He pushed the bottle towards me, and I took it. ‘There’s a girl, now. There’s a love. On your wrist.’

I got it by the atomiser and held out my arm. I pressed. There was a tiny hiss, a fine cold spray: I felt it touch me before I smelled it, but the smell came soon after, drifting upwards from the bottle and then, as it warmed, from my skin. It was a smell of things I couldn’t name, though I went through myself looking for them. I thought of the raspberries my father grew in the garden in summer, the sourness that squirted from the plastic lemon in the kitchen cupboard, the bath foam my mother liked. None of them smelled like this.

The Englishman sighed. ‘Closer,’ he said. ‘Come a bit closer there.’

I leaned even closer, and his hand came up and touched me just beneath the elbow. His fingernails had ridges running through them, as if they had been folded. Very gently he guided my wrist towards his face. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Just the most beautiful smell.’

‘It’s really nice.’

‘Christ, it isn’t nice. It’s gorgeous. It’s wild! And your skin – you know everyone’s skin has a different smell?’

He had brought my wrist so close to his face that I could feel his warm breath, the stubble on his lip, the hairs poking from his nose.