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seeing. His outline was strong against the lilac that was changing minute by minute into a more ordinary darkness.
    ‘It’s starting to rain,’ said Adam. ‘The windows in the next room are wide open. Is it part of your flat?’
    ‘It’s Joe’s room,’ I said. ‘He always leaves them open. He wakes up and finds rain in a pool on the floor.’
    I fried the chicken in oil, added stock and wine and the vegetables. The pan spat and a plume of savoury steam went up to the low ceiling. It was Joe who’d taught me to cook. I only knew about beans on toast, pizza and toasted sandwiches before I met him.
    Joe had watched me eat my usual food without comment, for the first few weeks. He never criticized it, but he brought me into the pleasure world step by step. He’d taught himself everything and then he taught me. I’d been living with half nothing, believing I was lucky if Ihad a cheese roll for lunch and the hot water didn’t run out before I had my bath. Joe taught me to go into shops I’d walked past automatically all my life. I went inside and bought wine and flowers and books and music.
    One day, to make Joe smile, I wrote out the menus which my adoptive mother fed to us on a two-weekly rotation. I remembered every meal by heart.
    Week One, Monday: Corned beef, tinned peas and tinned new potatoes. Strawberry Angel Delight.
    Each morning we measured out our cornflakes with an off-white melamine cup. To drink there was hot Ribena, or hot Bovril, or good fresh water from the tap.
    The glory of my adoptive mother’s housekeeping was that she was never hostage to the seasons. They filled the boot of their Mazda with tins and packets once a month. She was particular about where the tins came from. Corned beef from Argentina was no good even if it was on special offer. To buy Heinz baked beans was to spend money for the sake of spending money. Only fools bought instant mashed potato, which had no food value compared to the tinned variety.
    She taught me that potatoes were waxen and slippery and came ready-peeled, carrots grew in cubes and corned beef had to be warmed under the hot tap to loosen its coat of fat so that it would glop out of the tin. At Christmas we had a Plumrose Ham from a bigger tin. The strip of metal that wound onto the key-opener was so long that it sometimes broke under the tension, slashing a thumb.
    Day by day, Joe undid my good housekeeping. I got soil on my fingers, and I sliced up meat which bled. I learned to check the eyes of fish before I bought them,to see if they were full and bright, and then not to look into them again. We picked shot out of pheasants, and I learned that hares, like horses, have saddles.
    We were in the middle of all this life when Adam came.
    ‘I’ll put on some music,’ said Joe. He had installed a sound system throughout the flat. There were speakers in the kitchen, his room, my room, the big square landing which was big enough for a sofa where Joe would lie late at night, punch-drunk with work, while Blind Willie Johnson sang ‘I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole’.
    Joe should have gone out of the kitchen door, across the landing and into his room. But he passed behind me, brushing against my body so that I turned. Adam moved aside as Joe pushed open both kitchen windows, pressed his hands down on the sill, and vaulted into the gully outside. The parapet was maybe eighteen inches high. It ran the length of the terrace, and a low wall divided the gully outside the kitchen from the gully outside Joe’s room.
    Joe sprang into the gully. He balanced himself, and turned to face left. There he was, printed on my eyes against the darkness. He rose up, outlined against the lights of the city that dropped away beneath us. If he made a mistake the next surface he would hit was a stone terrace, five floors down.
    He stepped back two or three paces. I did not know what he was doing, but then I saw he needed to take a run so he could jump the low wall that divided the