No, she wouldn’t deliberately do anything to let Jim down. She just sucked, was all, which meant she was in an impossible situation: landed with a job she couldn’t do but couldn’t do without.

The subject stopped again. She didn’t figure him for a window-shopper, particularly in a lane specialising largely in interior furnishings and decidedly girlie knick-knacks, so there was a strong possibility that he was checking his six. The likelihood was that he was on the lookout for Jim, but with his suspicion piqued, she couldn’t afford to be noticed. Without a back-up to take over the follow, the procedure was to walk past and stop to look in another window, waiting for him to overtake again. She kept her head down as she passed him, but in her need for reassurance that she wasn’t being noticed, she stole a glance to see where he was looking – just as he turned to check back along the lane. Their eyes met. She kept walking, feeling her cheeks burn and her stomach leaden with that familiar feeling of having blown it.

Jim had this sun-yellowed cartoon on the wall of his cluttered and poky little office in Arden on the south side. It showed a geeky-looking guy standing in his place as part of an orchestra. He was holding a cymbal in his right hand, and in a thought bubble he was saying to himself: ‘This time I won’t screw up, I won’t screw up, I won’t screw up.’ It was only when you looked more closely that you noticed that in his left hand he was holding nothing at all. It was captioned: ‘Roger screws up.’

That was how Jasmine felt every day on the job. It felt like the harder she tried, the more she found new ways to blunder. Even now, as she coached herself to stay focused, as she determined not to screw up, she feared that simply by doing so she was diverting her own attention from the fact that she was missing a cymbal.

She had to rationalise, though. Their eyes had met, but it wasn’t strictly speaking a funny. She wasn’t burned, but she was on a yellow card. She had been noticed, so he’d recognise her if he found her looking again, but right now she was just a girl who’d caught his eye, and he hers. He was kind of leery anyway: he probably got clocked eyeing girls every time he walked down a street.

She crossed the lane and looked in a window of her own, her pulse rising as she waited, hoping, to see him pass in the reflection, all the more desperate to get a result because Jim had been forced to leave it in her ‘capable’ hands.