(‘This is what you always do.’ She wonders for whom he’s performing when he says that: they’ve known each other less than a month. This is their second argument and the first was over something very different. She shrugs. He can take it as an apology if he wants, though it isn’t.

‘Fill your pen,’ she says.

‘Seriously, you’re loving this, aren’t you?’ Is it some ex he’s angry with? It feels to her like a character. A woman from a play. Don’t recruit me to your dramas, she thinks.

‘Just fill it.’

They lean-he as if he’s doing her a favour-over the broken bones and smashed innards and the ruined trembling feathers. At the other tables the diners look away, to their own pigeons.

‘Your turn with the gall,’ she says, thinking See? I even give you that. She submerges the nib of her own fountain pen into blood, and levers the little pump.)