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corpse. Her skin greyed, her legs looked like she had rickets, her hair began to fall out. But even like this, she exuded a childlike sexuality that seemed to draw men to her.
     
    Rose, bored by the people that Polly had begun to hang out with – junkies breed junkies – had, for the first time in her life, started going out on her own and making her own friends. She and a couple of her PGCE contemporaries had edged their way into a group of older boy MA Fine Art students at Goldsmiths, where they were all studying. She enjoyed hanging out with them, spending half-term afternoons in lock-ins in smoky New Cross pubs, arguing about minimalism, structuralism and postmodernism over pints of Red Stripe. She was drawn to the conceptual, left-brain stuff they went on about, but was at a loss to understand how they then translated that into creative work. It was something that still both perplexed her and provoked her admiration.
     
    The MA boys were romantic figures, all work-worn fingers, splattered DMs and intense cigarette rolling. Christos had caught her eye from early on, and it wasn’t very long before he asked her to go with him to ‘this little Greek place my Uncle Stavros runs’.
     
    It was the middle of a heatwave and everything about London was a little heightened. The night they went to the restaurant, darkness had brought no relief from the humidity of the day. It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary nights of Rose’s life.
     
    After a dinner of char-grilled souvlaki, thick garlicky tsatsiki and tooth-achingly sweet baklava, Rose and Stavros stayed drinking Raki and Greek coffee until the restaurant closed. Opening bottles of cold beer and chilled Retsina and handing them out to all the restaurant staff after hours, Uncle Stavros turned the music up loud, cleared the floor and turned the place into a party venue. This was quite normal, Christos had explained, for a weekend evening.
     
    The night was long and sweaty. Rose found herself dancing next to a dripping, squat Mexican dish-wash boy and a waitress she had decided early on was a great beauty. Then Christos stepped in, put his arm around her waist and in a gesture that was grand and romantic, like something from an old-fashioned movie, he swept her away so that he had her all to himself.
     
    They danced for hours, glued together at the groin – skin on skin with her arms under his T-shirt, twined around his back. He smelled, she remembered, of Eau Sauvage, garlic and fresh sweat. She could recall it so clearly even now, over a decade later, with him in his grave, and it still made her make a small involuntary sound at the back of her throat when she thought about it.
     
    Then at four-thirty, just before sunrise, his uncle called a load of cabs. Everyone poured out of the restaurant into the clammy night and piled in.
     
    ‘Now for the best part of the evening!’ Christos grinned as he handed her into the taxi.
     
    They went up to Hampstead Heath, where, like a pack of giggling children, they climbed over fences to break into one of the bathing ponds. This was how they always ended a hot Saturday night, Christos said. It was a hangover from the days when his uncle had run a restaurant in the Plaka in Athens, and they had all gone down to Rafina to see the dawn in from the Aegean, before a trip to the fish market to buy the next day’s menu.
     
    ‘Hampstead Heath Pond isn’t quite the same, and the fisk is delivered in a dirty white van, but what can you do?’ Uncle Stavros shrugged, and, tugging off his clothes to reveal a darkly-haired body that had seen perhaps too many souvlaki and kleftiko, he bellyflopped into the cold, dark water.
     
    The others followed him. They were all so hot, the water practically sizzled when they jumped in.
     
    Christos swam across the pond, leading Rose off to a dark corner, away from the others. As the shouts and laughter died down, and everyone began to drift off, Rose and Christos made love, naked