He looked startled. ‘Is this for real?’

‘I told you I was planning to learn.’

‘Spanish is really more useful,’ he said. ‘Unless you’re planning to go to Brazil. Or Angola or Mozambique.’

‘Or Portugal,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said, sounding doubtful. ‘Was it the women? I may have exaggerated about them.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I like the sound of the language.’

Mick’s expression relaxed. ‘I do too,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not taking the piss. Boa sorte.’

‘What?’

‘Good luck.’

For the next few weeks, I lived my life happily in compartments. There was the Portuguese compartment, where I was a person planning a project in Brazil. There was the work compartment. Down in Camberwell I was the young apprentice, eager to learn. It was always good to pretend to know less than you really did. I could clearly see that Dario was taking the housemates at Maitland Road for a ride. He was allegedly paying his rent in kind, by doing the house up. It was mainly painting, but he also did a bit of electrics, a bit of carpentry, even some plastering and plumbing. It was a botch job. When he painted a room, he couldn’t be bothered to tape up the wood frames. I mentioned it once but he said it was a waste of time. All that was needed was a steady hand. The result was paint speckles on the woodwork. His carpentry was all ragged edges, protruding screws and ill-fitting joints. If his electrical work was of the same standard, there was probably a risk of fire.

I thought of mentioning it to Miles and provoking a row, but that didn’t fit with the role I was creating. For the moment, I was the perfect housemate, the one who did the washing-up and patched over disagreements. It was always useful to have ammunition that could be used later.

I wanted to get to know the housemates individually. One evening I wandered out into the garden to get a shirt off the line and found Dario in a corner, smoking a joint. He offered it to me and I took a puff.

‘It’s good stuff, isn’t it?’ he said.

It never had much effect on me. I’d always found it difficult to see why it meant so much to other people, why they gave it so much attention. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s really good stuff.’

I handed it back to Dario who took a fearsome drag on it, the tip flaming up.

‘I can get some for you, if you want,’ he said. ‘For a good price. Just say the word.’

I didn’t reply. So that was how he earned his pocket money.

‘But don’t mention it to Miles,’ said Dario, dropping the roach and stamping on it. ‘He’s a bit paranoid about it.’

In the early days, I phoned Astrid’s mobile on a Friday afternoon about some shopping that needed to be done. She suggested we meet up at a pub where she went at the end of the week. When I arrived at the Horse and Jockey, it was full of other despatch riders, spilling out of the doors, overflowing from the pavement on to the road. It was like a huge, bustling party that I hadn’t been invited to, except that I had. I wandered around and found Astrid sitting with a black guy, in his thirties, strongly built, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, head completely shaved. I wondered if he was another boyfriend, but she introduced him to me as Campbell, her ‘so-called boss’. I bought a drink for her and for him, and for another man sitting at her other side and one for myself, and they made room for me at the table. I enjoyed sitting there, watching this strange breed. There were riders in bright yellow tops, like competitors in the Tour de France, and there were scruffy young men in cut-off jeans and vests, and older men, grizzled, deeply tanned, with long hair in dreadlocks or ponytails. I sat and sipped my drink while they joshed each other, gossiped and complained about their clients.

‘The problem,’ said Campbell, returning with another round of drinks, ‘is that they spend their lives cycling from rich person to rich person. They step through the door and they look at these people with their servants and their posh hallway, and then they get back on their bike.’

‘So, do you really hate the people you deliver to?’ I asked Astrid.

She laughed, eyes sparkling, and began to answer, but she was interrupted by Neil, the other man at the table. ‘Basically we’re offering a service, and they’re free to use that service in any way they choose, whether it be to deliver a consignment of valuables or to fetch a hot dog for them.’

Astrid laughed again. ‘And we’re free to say they’re stuck-up bastards with too much money.’

‘Valuables?’ I said.

‘Documents, mainly,’ she said, and winked at Neil. Could he have been another ex-boyfriend?

And then there was Peggy. I treated her as an exercise, a bit like the homework I brought back from my Portuguese class. I found her boring and unattractive, and I wondered what she thought of me. Did she see me as the son she’d never had? Or did she even see me as a fantasy young lover? It was a grotesque thought, but not impossible. Or maybe it was a combination of the two. Mothers often flirt with their sons, although they’d be shocked if you pointed it out to them. And it’s possible that old women don’t see themselves as old. They still have the fantasy that a young man might be attracted to them, that he would see through what they’ve become to what they once were. I found it terrible to think that women like Astrid turned into women like Peggy.

I decided that I would talk to Peggy as if she was a young woman like Astrid, not the old woman she was. I met her in the street a few times over those weeks, and usually she invited me in for tea. The third time, I accepted her offer of a glass of wine. She took a half-full bottle from the fridge. We drank it in her garden because it was warm and the evenings were becoming lighter with each passing day. I sat quite close to her, touching her sometimes as we talked, the way young people do, a hand on an arm to make a point. I saw a glitter in her eyes when I did it, a yes. The funny thing was that when I talked to Peggy pretending she was a young woman, I did better than when I talked to actual young women. It occurred to me that I should talk to young women pretending I was talking to an old woman pretending she was a young woman. Life is complicated.

Each time, when she left me alone in her kitchen for a few minutes, I helped myself to some money. I saw it as a contribution to my other role of generous housemate, coming home with bottles of wine. The third time, on that May evening, I thought we were getting on so well, that she was so grateful for my attention, that I took a bit too much: twenty or thirty pounds. But I thought she wouldn’t mind. It was like a fee for giving her a good time.

I liked the idea of these different lives I was leading, and all the time I felt I was gaining power. The housemates had known each other for longer than I had but I knew so much they didn’t. I had watched them. I had seen inside their rooms. I knew what Dario was doing to the house. I knew what kind of photographs Owen was taking. I knew Margaret Farrell. None of the rest of them knew her or knew I knew her. I had seen Pippa naked. She had seen me naked. That hadn’t worked out. Did it matter? When I met her afterwards, she was exactly as friendly as she had been before. There seemed nothing between us. Had it made her feel sympathy for me? Pity? Contempt? Or did she feel nothing? Certainly there had been other men since me and I doubted that they had failed where I had. I was just another name on the list, except that I wasn’t properly on it. I wondered if I should try to take another chance with her. Except that I might fail again. It was easier for women.