And for nearly a month I was redeemed. I liked nothing more than hearing Rochi tease me. She had taken all the good things from her good school, she was so confident and curious, kind and unembarrassed. When I was next to her I believed that the rich were better than the poor. They hadn’t been deformed by envy and bitterness. They had been free to think and express themselves, to study under the guidance of the world’s best teachers. They were so good-looking and healthy. They had experienced the best of British cultural life. When they married each other it was more than wealth marrying wealth – it was beauty and intelligence marrying beauty and intelligence. You couldn’t blame them for it.

On those light spring evenings I’d walk over to London Fields to the flat Rochi shared with a friend in Broadway Market. She was taking meetings with publishers and production companies about writing her own book and hosting her own TV series about preparing and cooking fish. She was going to be famous.

It was her skill at slicing into fish that left me completely helpless, that she could do something so practical and unsqueamish. She made me think of home, and she liked hearing about home, or tolerated it at least, that blankness at the edge of things, the white noise of the sea, the smell of life fizzing up and going off. I began to imagine taking her there, walking down the street with her and watching people look at her, watching people hate her.

‘This is just a bit of fun, yeah?’ she said one morning when I walked her to the Overground station.

‘I know. Of course!’ I said, but I was too enthusiastic.

‘Oh, Paul,’ she said. ‘We need to talk.’

‌

‌Eleven

My hairdresser and I were discussing his brother, Tony. I played football with Tony every week, Tony who had taken to posting videos about the problem with Islam and feminists and Jeremy Corbyn and the Guardian. He was all in favour of Brexit, and Donald Trump’s election campaign, and this was regarded by some people as such a strange look for a black man that he was frequently accused online of being a white supremacist, hiding behind the profile photo of a black man. This did not make Tony less angry or more liberal, and now he had started wearing a Make America Great Again cap to our weekly five-a-side game, which, as we played in Whitechapel, most people thought was ironic, or just Tony’s quirky style. There was no reason, of course, why a black man should not have the same right as the rest of us to post videos of Tommy Robinson talking about Islamic fascists who ran paedophile gangs, these Muslims who got away with it because of people like me who read the Guardian and hated the working people and refused to condemn their enemies. But we wished he wouldn’t.