I first met P at three in the morning on a lowering June night in a twenty four hour Londis near Finsbury Park tube. I was shuffling through the door in search of cheap coffee and Tampax when he rounded a corner at speed and caught me under the arm, singing Frank Sinatra and hiccuping with laughter as he ran with me out of the shop. We didn't stop until we got to a piss and chip slick alley round the back of the station where he suddenly let go and I was left gulping down air and wondering whether to throw my rape alarm at him and run (batteries cannibalised for remote controls and sex toys) or attempt formal introductions. We looked at one another, both surprised and not quite.

Later that morning he tried to explain that he thought I was his mate, even though his mate was six foot three, black and not wearing his ex-boyfriend's old Arsenal slippers. We were sat in a sopping greasy spoon eating fried egg sandwiches as he told me that the friend in question had caught his girlfriend poking holes in his condoms with a drawing pin so they'd been drinking since noon, sitting in the park mixing Tesco vodka with tap water until it got dark and they'd had to climb over the razor wire to get out. Neither wanted to go home so they'd wandered the streets looking for entertainment until they'd found it in the form of the Londis in-store announcement system and a security guard unimpressed with their singular version of Come Fly With Me. I sat scraping the dirt from beneath the table's formica layers with a fingernail and watching the smile that crept slowly from one corner of his mouth to the next until the room was so full of it I couldn't breathe.

We didn't fuck, not at first. I sat on the worn carpet and looked round the room while he made tea. There were slippers under his bed, adult sized but furry white with nylon whiskers and long pink ears. He said they'd been there when he moved in the week before, the only thing in the bare room like a warning against being late with the rent from the Disney Mafia. He kept them in case their original owner came back for them and she was beautiful. I clicked my heels and told him mine were the only thing my boyfriend had not taken when he left three months ago. I hope you don't mind, he said, holding up a steaming measuring jug with two straws, but there's no cups.

I stayed a week, then a month. One day he turned from the door and, after a pause, said; we should swap.