They had met at the freshers’ fair, signing up for the paper. Duncan wore black skinny jeans that made his legs look like liquorice sticks, and a navy wool duffel coat with huge pockets. His skin was bad, his hair unwashed; he looked dirty and sullen and proud, as if he had just survived six months at sea. When she’d said this to him later, in a moment of drunken exuberant disburdening, he’d said, ‘No, you’re thinking of a reefer jacket.’

Claire had borrowed that coat innumerable times, and even fallen asleep on it. It was scratchy, and it smelled of damp tobacco. The pockets had holes in the corners that coins dropped through – you could feel them around the hem, like tiny weights.

She set about trying to find a story, the right story, but her only idea was college catering: kitchen wastage; unfairly tendered contracts with suppliers; the astonishing predominance of processed carbohydrates in students’ meals. Sub-par nourishment for over-par brains! It was ridiculous. She complained one morning to June, the scout for the building, when June came to clean Claire’s room and found her listless and afraid.

‘Oh, I could tell you some things about this place,’ June said breezily. She had violet-coloured pouches beneath her eyes, and hair that did not seem to be subject to gravity at all, that floated around her face like a puff of seed.

‘Like what?’ Claire asked. Other girls in the building didn’t talk to June much, but Claire found it easy. June was like her aunties; she was like the women who’d worked in the offices at her school, where half the buildings were prefabricated, like builders’ huts. There was a kind of ease between them that Claire felt proud of being able to create.

‘Like you wouldn’t believe,’ June said. ‘Bursars stealing then buggering off. Shahs getting their kids in without the proper qualifications, just talking to the principal and making a big donation the same year. The roof on this building came from a shah!’

‘How d’you know?’

‘His daughter told me. She had the room down the hall. Never picked up her clothes neither, never did a damn thing, and then she used to lie there while I was hoovering and watch. Lovely eyes. She used all that eyeliner, like they do.’

‘That’s amazing,’ Claire said. Imagine! She would have to go digging into the donors’ list, and then she’d have to cross-reference it with the alumni roll, and even then it might not be clear.

‘Once there was this amateur cricket club over from – I don’t know where, Malaysia or something …’

Might there be something about the new roof in the college newsletter? It was exactly the kind of thing they’d want to boast about.

‘… then it was later that day, I was in cleaning the loos upstairs, and he just appeared in the doorway.’

‘Who did?’