I woke up fully clothed, with oily hands. The more vivid details of my journey home struggled to arrange themselves into sequence: falling off my bike repeatedly, making emergency repairs, giving all my money to a homeless man after a bin jumped out at me and I rode up a lamp post. I was due at Emily Nardini’s in forty-five minutes. I did not have time to remove the oil from my hands, have a shower or charge my phone – just to pull up the address on my laptop and draw a map on my arm of how to get to her house from the Tube stop. I grabbed my voice recorder, splashed some water on my face and ran out of the house, forgetting to take with me the list of questions I had prepared to ask her.

*

I had been giddy and happy on the Overground; one or two of the many martinis I had poured into myself must have remained active. When I changed to the Tube, however, and started to think about the photographer, I began to feel hot and panicky. I could not work out whether the way the light was flickering in the carriage was a malfunction inside or outside me. I am not a man who drinks in the mornings, but it was clear to me that in this case not drinking was more irresponsible. The only pubs open at this time are Wetherspoons and I didn’t like my chances of finding one in Holland Park, so when I rose into daylight I quickly nipped into an off-licence.

Holland Park: that address had thrown me. The protagonists of her novels are always impoverished runaways, cleaners, waitresses, hotel staff, hairdressers, writers or even less employable artists, all roughly the same age as Nardini, living in a room of their own, bed, upright chair, no room for books or bag.

The street I was led to by the map on my arm was a quiet, tree-lined curve of tall white buildings. Outside her door I opened a can of Coke, took a swig and replaced it with an inch of whisky from the little bottle I had just bought. Then I rang the door and waited.

*

I was surprised by how friendly she looked, how cheerfully she held out her hand. More than the intervening years, it was the unexpected range of expression that made her look so different from her photograph. Her beauty was still there, but it was warmer and less intimidating when she smiled. She was only very pretty, terrestrial, made up with eyeliner and mascara.

I held out my hand and she withdrew hers.

‘Oh, shit, yes,’ I said.

‘Have you been fixing cars?’ she asked.

‘Tinkering with my ute,’ I said, in an Australian accent. I make bad jokes when I’m nervous. She didn’t smile so I reverted to British English. ‘A bike, actually.’ I looked at my hands. ‘It’s very hard to get off.’