By ‘they’, she meant the Chinese students, who always fed themselves in teams of four or six, filling the whole kitchen with steaming pans. Anything that looked like a noodle June attributed to them, though Claire had never once seen them cook noodles: they seemed to favour packets of readymade tortellini and ravioli, which they boiled up and covered in butter and parmesan and ate with forks at the communal table. June’s casual racism had not bothered Claire the other day, when June mentioned the shah’s daughter. It had seemed like something speaking through her, not something she had chosen for herself. But first the shah, then the Malaysian chap, now this: June was othering them – and openly, too. Did she imagine that she and Claire had this in common?

‘The rest of the girls were just like you,’ June said, talking on regardless. ‘All cross and saying I ought to do something. But you think that when it’s someone else, don’t you? You think it was probably worse than it was.’

‘What if they come back? What if he does it to someone else?’

‘Oh, they haven’t been back for years. They won’t be back now, I don’t think.’

She had started cleaning the sink. The hot water ran hard against the stainless steel.

‘I think that’s a bit irresponsible, actually,’ Claire cried, above the tropical noise. ‘Have you seen the college articles? They’re very clear about sexual misconduct.’

June pressed her hand against her side, as if she were climbing a hill and had got a stitch. She turned off the tap. ‘This plughole’s blocked. I’d better get the thingamajig.’

Claire waited, inspecting the sink, which didn’t seem blocked at all. The water drained; she saw her face in the bottom, a pink smear. Arguments came to her: that women have a responsibility to each other to speak up when it counts; that June’s coming forward, in whatever form, might be exactly what someone else needed to hear. But all she could see was June’s puffball hair blowing this way and that, never settling, never touching down, catching the breeze and tumbling June sideways out of the room.

Really, it was more than racism speaking through her. It was sexism too, it was all kinds of ingrained obliviousnesses, ones Claire didn’t have time to correct. The story would wriggle away from her. It would jump, like an unhooked fish, and nobody, nobody, was ever going to catch it again, because June – she could tell – had scared herself, or Claire had scared June with how seriously she had taken her allegations.