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‘Not wanting to die,’ she says. ‘Just…waiting for it to happen, when it does. Like you’re already anticipating the end.’ Her face scrunches up. ‘Do you know how long we’re expected to live? I mean, our generation? We could live to a hundred, easy. A hundred!’ She shakes her head, hair flung about her, then settling deftly. ‘I feel I’ve lived a whole life already, Stewart, at twenty-five. I look at kids half my age, or even just ten years younger and I just feel so…so distant from them. Was I that annoying, that precocious, that stupidly sure of myself, that shallow when I was their age?’ She shakes her head. ‘But that life expectancy means another three lives on top of this one. More, in a way, because you don’t have to go through half of each one being a kid.’ A shrug. ‘Except more decrepit in the last one or two, towards the end. Incontinence, dementia, deafness, arthritis. Back to being as helpless as a child.’

I nod. ‘Always good to have something to look forward to. Though we might have really good replacement stuff by then. And robots, to look after us, if our — if people won’t.’

‘Yeah, but something’ll get us in the end.’

‘Probably cancer. Unless the robots turn on us, obviously. Personally I’m hoping to die in my eighties, relatively young and still vigorous, when the father of the sixteen-year-old twins I’m in bed with bursts in and puts a laser bolt through my head.’

‘But do you see what I mean? Sometimes I feel like I just want to keep my head down, never get beaten up or raped, never become a refugee or a war widow, never starve or have to bury my own children…If I ever…But, just get out of this life without being hurt any more…And that’ll feel like victory, like getting away with it? Do you understand? I mean, not that I’ve been badly hurt, not really—’

‘Yeah, well. Not for the want of me—’

‘No. I mean not compared to women who have been raped or tortured or watched their loved ones shot in front of them. Not compared to somebody who’s been beaten up every night or been burned with acid or had their ears and nose cut off for leaving a violent husband. Compared to that, what you did to me was nothing.’ She looks at me. It’s a challenging look more than a forgiving one, so I choose not to say anything. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she says. ‘It was still stupid, selfish, petty, unbearably insulting at the time, but …’

‘But you still took me to the station.’

She snorts. ‘Ha! You could say that was just me being selfish, as ever. I didn’t want to see them kill you or maim you, or even know that they had. Didn’t want that on my conscience. I wanted to prove I was bigger than you.’

‘Well, I’m still grateful,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll never know how—’

‘Oh, it didn’t end there,’ she tells me. ‘I had to fight — I mean, shout and scream and threaten all sorts of grisly stuff, things I never thought I’d hear myself say…All to stop them sending somebody to London to do something horrible to you, or getting one of their underworld pals down there to take the job on, for a price or just as a favour.’

‘Jesus. I had no idea.’

And I really didn’t. Sure, when I moved down to London I kept my door locked and used the security camera when the bell went, and I didn’t walk down any dark alleys if I could avoid it, just in case a Murston brother came calling to administer a well-deserved beating, but apparently almost everybody in London does this risk-limitation stuff as a matter of course anyway.

‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m glad you had no idea.’

I leave it a few moments, then ask, ‘Why did you do it?’

‘What, spirit you away? Protect you?’

‘Yeah. There must have been part of you wanted the boys to give me a good kicking, right then.’

She shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, there wasn’t. Not right then. I was in shock for all of about five seconds, then I just had this sudden, very…very cold, in a way, very adult feeling that, Well, that was that all over, there’d be no wedding, you and I were finished, I was on my own again, but, like, what could I do to keep the damage to a minimum? What was the best course of action? For me and everybody else? And getting you away as fast as possible seemed really obvious, just what needed to be done, for everybody’s good, not just yours. Even arranging a false trail, getting somebody — Ferg as it turned out — to order a taxi to the airport in your name just popped right into my head, right there. So that’s what I did.’

She looks at me with a strange expression, one I’m not sure I can read at all.

‘You want to know the truth?’ she says, her voice very languid, cool and poised. ‘I’ve rarely — maybe never — felt so alive, so in control, so good about myself, as I did that night.’

She looks away, sighs.