She couldn’t help it, she felt herself flush profusely. At school, she had had a crush on Douglas Thompson so intense she had been flattened by it, rolled out like a piece of unleavened dough. She had not been the only one. Everyone was touched by him, with his quiet confidence and his sense of self.

‘Wow . . .’ she said, stupidly seventeen again.

Dougie hadn’t just been the coolest boy in school; he was also the cleverest. Not as clever as Emma, but only because he didn’t work as hard.

‘I thought it was you!’ he said, lifting one long leg over the back wheel and picking up the bike as if it were no heavier than a bag of crisps. He brought it back to where she was standing. ‘I thought, I know that girl . . .’

Girl. It hadn’t been until the first year of A-levels that he’d even noticed Emma. He was going out with Deborah Jenkins at the time – he only went out with cool girls, not Goths like Emma and Sally Pea – and the rumour was that he’d got Deborah pregnant. Emma remembered the day when the maths teacher had given him a hard time for not handing in his work and she had passed him hers under the table. They’d hung out a bit after that and Deborah Jenkins had got her to be a kind of go-between. And she did get between. She and Dougie would get so carried away talking that they’d both completely forget to pass messages back to Deborah. And when Deborah began to freeze her out, Emma had understood for the first time the powers of her own attraction.

‘You look really well,’ he said. What he meant was: you used to be so fat. Puppy fat, her mother had called it; pointing it out the very day Emma had begun to appreciate her own contours.

‘I mean, I liked the Goth look and everything . . .’

Any personal comment made her blush – she no longer had the white make-up to hide behind – and she felt the second wave of blood rush about her body and settle on her chest. There was nothing she could do about it; it betrayed her time and again, announcing her inner feelings to the outside world.

‘How are you? Do you live round here?’ he asked.

‘Thanks. Fine. No . . . Do you?’

‘Yeah, not far. Battersea. You’re a doctor, aren’t you, a psychiatrist . . . ?’

‘That’s right.’ She was flung back to the contradictions of her youth: the self-assurance masking the vulnerability, the cliques, the passions, the stuttering, that heavy weight of the future brimful with possibility.

‘Sally and I always thought you were going to be prime minister!’ he said. She laughed. Had they really? ‘But I’m not surprised you’ve gone into people’s heads; you were always curious. And kind.’

The flush on her chest burned again. ‘And you?’ she asked. ‘What do you do?’