No one pays me much attention as I hurry along the wide boulevards, not having any real sense of where I am going. I have in mind to find a department store, grab a few things from there, but I’m conscious that my cash isn’t going to last forever, and I’m concerned now that none of the cards I have will work. Most of them I picked up in Thailand, from drunken Brits, who’d been waving them at the distractingly pretty staff. I got three in one night, all from the same crowd of idiotic rugby lads who really should’ve known better. I had developed a foolproof scam of standing close to them while they tapped their pin in to the card reader, then pretended I’d been jostled into them, grabbing their waist to stop myself falling over, sliding a hand into their pocket to remove the freshly used card. In most cases, they’d wait until the next day before cancelling, so I was able to withdraw the maximum, twice. I kept the cards as souvenirs, and I marked them with a code on my little piece of paper – the code being a quick drawing of the place I’d taken it, or the person that I’d taken it from.

I stopped doing it for a while, when I met Sam. I’d assumed I wouldn’t need to – that he would be happy to pay for things for me – but that was just something else I got wrong about him.

I have no idea where I am, but I don’t feel like I am in the main hub of the city yet. So far, Moscow is not nearly as pretty as I’d imagined. The streets are grey, the buildings nondescript. I’m not sure what I expected, but I know that when I get to the river and Red Square and St Peter’s Basilica, it will look like all the photographs I have seen online over the years. So far it’s not unlike Irkutsk: harsh apartment blocks, small, soulless squares, bored-looking people sitting on benches, unapologetically drinking from cans of beer or bottles of vodka. The people I pass are hurried, drab and uninterested. Where are the glamorous hooker-types like the girls at the party?

I turn the corner and there is a row of sad-looking shops, the signs old and faded. Even the mannequins in the windows look bored. But the clothes look half decent, and I imagine them to be cheaper here than in the centre, so I go into the one with the least depressing display.