5 There is no queue outside La Rustica at 7:30, no evidence that a show is happening in the somewhat upmarket Italian restaurant on Regent Street. You’ve eaten here once before, a special-occasion meal to celebrate a graduation or a promotion, and when you are ushered inside, the decor is familiar – overbrushed velvet on the banquettes and drapes and hand-painted scenes of Umbria on the walls, dents of plaster and scratches of previous diners’ love-declaring graffiti. It’s a comforting familiarity because you’re suddenly nervous of being out with this person. This show is a stupid choice for an official first date – so many potential traps, so many possible ways to make a fool of yourself.

The man at the front desk checks your names on the guest list, nods and smiles and then asks you for your phones. The invitation detailed the strict no-phone, no-recording, no-uploading, no-nothing policy, and you’ve been prepared to cede your phone, but still it feels like an invasive and risky demand.

Your table is in an alcove towards the back of the restaurant and you glance at the other paired-up guests as you pass – mothers and daughters, friends, colleagues, and a scattering of more established couples than you.

The trappings of a perfectly ordinary dinner date to start with. Mood music, soft temperature, a martini as an aperitif. The only glaring indicator that this is a Metamuse fabrication are the headphones you’re instructed to put on.

Set up on the table between you is a board game of sorts, like chess with fewer squares and large abstract pieces made of scented wax. The voice in your ears instructs you how to move your pieces as you drink your cocktail. You get the feeling that you’re being calibrated – monitored. You figure out the cat-and-mouse pattern of the game that consists of about fifteen minutes of intense, flirtatious avoidance, eventually culminating in you and your date touching fingers over the last piece. The little action is charged after all the evasion, and the wax piece is beginning to soften, the combined heat of your hands moulding it and turning it into an imprint of the space between you, the notches where your bodies might fit.

Then you eat. Perfectly tender pasta and garlic bread oozing with butter – again, probably not a good first-date choice, but it’s a choice you believe you’ve decided from the menu, not preordained by the voice, and it’s cut pleasantly by the bottles of red wine.

After the meal, you are given parts to repeat in a dovetailed story, and then gradually given space to improvise. You can’t remember what your lines were now, because you were also instructed to keep looking into each other’s eyes as the story unwinds. The first minute is funny; the second and third uncomfortable and awkward; by the fourth, you are seeing rainbows around your partner’s head. By the tenth, their face is your own.

* * *

The tantalising foreplay of the show had reached an excruciating pitch by the last course. The game was over, and Petra had been left staring across at Vincent, her toes riding under his trousers and up his ankles under the table as she worked tiramisu between her lips. By the glazed look in his eyes, she guessed he was sharing her vision of her skin smeared with the stuff, lying back and waiting for Vincent to clean her.

But when they’d got to her flat, they hadn’t managed to act on that vision. They hadn’t even got the lights on in the kitchenette, just struggled out of their clothes by the doorway. The next time was slower and more comfortable, and by then Petra was kinda relieved they hadn’t gone the full sticky kink, because she could rest in his strong arms and trace his skin against hers, map hairs and the spots and the scars that made up his life as he talked and moved against her, his ridged solidity pressing indelibly into her.

Eventually, she had to get up for a pee and a glass of water. Vincent stood up and stretched, making for her shelves and plugging some smooth groove into her dock. Falling Man’s Post-Mindblow Comedown Playlist.

‘What do you want?’ she asked from the kitchenette.

‘That’s a big question for three in the morning,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Besides rooibos tea?’

When he started riffling through a pile of her drawings, she let him – like letting someone scratch through her underwear drawer, skim through her diary – fighting the urge to hurry over and snatch his hands away as she steeped the tea and laid out biscuits on a plate. She avoided looking at him, afraid of one wrong reaction, but the noises were good, a muttering, a ‘hmm’, a gasp. ‘Jesus, these are good.’

When the tea was done, and only then, she placed them on the coffee-table crate and went to him and took his hand away, turning him and leading him back to the couch.

‘Show me some of your stuff. I loved what I saw in the studio. That was you, right?’ He allowed himself to be diverted and flicked onto a site on her tablet as she brought the tea. She settled herself into a twisted knot between his limbs and rested her head against his shoulder as he skimmed through the photos.

‘Ooh, this is gorgeous,’ she said when she got to an image of the fog-shrouded late-night Metro takeaway, its green and yellow neon blurring into a sickly hue that swirled over the hooded silhouettes of the smoking boys outside.

‘Yeah, I like it too. It’s our claim to fame,’ Vincent said, twirling a strand of her hair between his fingers.

‘What is?’

He pointed at the hand-lettered caption in the bottom-right corner. ‘“Ghost Town.” Haven’t you heard of it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Surely?’ He went into an eerie falsetto: ‘“This to–own, yaa, yaya yaya.”’

‘Um.’

‘The Specials recorded it at the Brook Street studios, released it in June 1981. It was big that year – it was like the theme tune to a few months of serious discontent. People in the cities felt like they were being neglected by Thatcher, the unions were being crushed, the owners getting richer, the workers getting screwed. You know, the usual. There were a few riots, stamped out of course. Some of the papers even called it Ghost Town Summer.’

‘1981, you say? I have to ask, but how old are you? There’s no way you could have been there.’

‘I was. Just about. A baby.’

Okay, she was getting somewhere. He must be about forty. That seemed about right. ‘So not rioting, then?’

‘Not on the streets, no.’ He smiled and Petra was glad for the light tone, the opportunity to steer away from politics. ‘You’ll hear my granddad on that track if you listen carefully. He re-ran some of the bass tracks on the master in post-production.’

‘That’s cool,’ she said, and the magic of recording struck her for a moment like it must have struck the first people to hear a voice playing off a wax cylinder. Here was the ghostly imprint of a man who’d just died, still being heard every time the song was played. Of course, anyone who was filmed or recorded or photographed was immortalised in the same way, but the fact that Vincent’s granddad’s imprint was almost invisible, just a flicker of the imagination, like a shadow flitting in the peripheral vision, an arcane secret known only to a few people, made it seem somehow more charmed.

Then Vincent stared at the dark square of the uncurtained sky, resettling into a thoughtful mood as if remembering where he was, who he was.

‘You look sad,’ she said, knowing it was probably a stupid, presumptuous thing to say. You don’t probe too deeply into a guy’s personal life when you’ve seen him like three times.

‘Yeah?’ he said, looking up at her and smiling thinly. ‘Sorry. Just lots on my mind.’

‘None of my business, really,’ she said. ‘I know this will sound stupid and presumptuous, but I don’t think you’re a sad person. You feel like a really positive, optimistic guy to me, and I think you’re hurting.’ Where the hell did that come from?

He nodded, looked into her eyes and linked his fingers with hers, deliberately recalling their intimacy from a few hours ago. ‘True, I guess. They say people’s brain chemistry determines their happiness baseline – the level you run at when everything’s going fine. I think I used to be quite happy… but things have been pretty rough lately.’

‘Can you tell me about it?’

He looked from her eyes to her lips, away to the wall, opened his mouth, took a long breath in. ‘I’d rather not. Sorry.’

She tried not to feel stung. ‘It’s honestly none of my business. But I genuinely hope you feel better soon. And I’ll help if I can. Okay?’ He smiled, a little patronisingly, but she pressed on, dogged as Helena when she’d found a mission to be on. ‘If you want to talk about it, I’m here.’

‘Sure.’

To deflate the tension, she proceeded to whitter on about the gap in British pop culture that kept on tripping her up at pub quizzes and game shows because she hadn’t grown up here, and who the hell were Squidgy and Flumpy and Mr Dick anyway? Some time while they were talking, they went back to bed and she passed out wrapped around him.