When I took my clothes off I realised I hadn’t washed for two days. I’d been collecting filth like the growth rings of a tree. As I showered I felt the warm water prising my pores, holding them open and scraping out the rubble and decay. I was growing weightless as the dirt vanished down the plughole.

The next thing I knew I was lying on the bed rubbing sleep from my eyes. My hair was matted so I gave it a few quick tugs with the brush. I put on some skinny jeans and under my coat I wore a purple jumper that had a polo neck big enough I could reach with my lip to chew it without taking my hands out of my pocket.

I’m on a mission
to tell every politician
that while they drink champagne and laugh
whole cultures starve
wrestling with us just for air
condemned to history’s electric chair
governments will never listen
or search the streets for cultures that go missing
so there’s no reason for the talk to carry on
that’s the point of the bomb

I was humming the tune of the song that gave the band its name when a man in a dark suit joined me in the lift. The immaculate way it was tailored made him look English. I was transfixed by the way the light played on his tie, which was made out of a red silk shot through with purple and blue and a hundred different greens and yellows.

His skin was grey like it was coated with fine cement powder. He looked at me through faded blue eyes, without blinking, and water collected in little pools that teetered on the edge of his eyelids. I wanted to tell him it was rude to stare when I realised I wasn’t just humming; I was singing the lyrics aloud and he could understand every word.

The door opened in the lobby and I expected him to make a dash for the exit, but he didn’t move. He stood between me and the door. I tried a smile. There was a flicker at the corner of his mouth but it was so small it could have been a tic. I didn’t want him to think I was staring him out so I tried to look somewhere else, but I only got as far as his hair. He had a sweep of grey, with streaks of silver so pure it shone like a halo. The style was as exact as his suit. But that wasn’t why I couldn’t shift my eyes. There was something else about this guy’s hair that had me hooked.

“That’s the point of the bomb, did you say?” he asked.

Here we go. “Sorry,” I said quietly.

“Is that what you said? That’s the point of the bomb? Is it?”

Oh shit, he thinks I’m some kind of psycho. “I’m really sorry,” I garbled. “They’re just lyrics from a song, that’s all.”

“I know they’re lyrics from a song,” he said. “My son wrote them.”

The doors pinged to say they were about to close and the guy in the suit looked down to press the button.

I had absolutely no idea what to say. He hadn’t a clue, of course, that I knew Michael, but his expression was clear. A mix of exhaustion, desperation, and a pinpoint of hope.

“I’m going for a beer,” I said. “Do you want to join me?” He wanted to talk to someone about his son, and I was happy to give up an hour to hear him talk about his daughter.  “I’m Sandrine. I was a friend of Michael’s.”

“Peter,” he answered, holding out his hand. A smile loosened his skin. It fell back into its natural folds and jowls, releasing tears from each eye that followed crooked paths through the furrows of his cheeks.

I didn’t take his hand. Instead I threaded it through the crook of my elbow and led him towards the bar, where I ordered us two beers and a bowl of olives.

Looking at him in his dark pressed suit, his old-world elegance fading into the neo-classical style of one of the sofas in the bar, I wondered if I should have got him a glass of wine instead, or a port, or sherry. But he seemed happy with his Pilsner, probably because the glass was big enough that holding it gave both his hands something to do.

“So Michael was your son?” I asked. It was only fair to start where he wanted and let the conversation drift to Claire in its own time.

“Yes, Michael was my son,” he repeated, the blue of his eyes filling out two shades and growing ten years younger as he said the name. “Did you know him well?”

“We spoke almost every day.”

“You live in England, then?”

“No. What I mean is we communicated by computer.” I had no idea how to explain the world of online political activism, of Bulletin Boards and chatrooms.

“I see,” he said, although I couldn’t imagine he did. “Through Endangered Worlds I suppose?”

“That’s right.”

“Same here,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s how I’ve spoken to him for the last three years. Every night in the chatrooms on Endangered Worlds.”

My head was asking a hundred questions but all that came out was: “Why?”

“Because for the first time in nearly forty years I’ve been able to talk to my son.”

All I could do was repeat, “Why?”

“It’s a very personal story,” he said. I’d pushed him too far, and I didn’t blame him for clamming up; but he carried on. “Before I tell you, I should probably introduce myself properly. Sandrinechanteuse – I assume from your age and your accent that’s who you are – it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Greenhamgal.”

“Well, Greenhamgal,” I said. “I’m delighted to meet you, too.”

“Now we’re properly acquainted let me explain. First, though.” He got up from his chair and took my glass. “I think I should get us another of these.”

I watched him head to the bar. This had none of the feel of a dream; but if it was real then I was talking to someone I’d chatted to for hours about their experiences of all-women camps at the anti-nuclear protests of the mid-80s, someone I’d been tempted more than once to ask about the openness of the lesbian community in England; and that someone was Michael and Claire’s father

He put two beers on the table between us and sat down.

*

I listened to Peter for an hour, during which I bought us two more beers and said nothing.

He was born in 1942. By 1963, when he left university without a degree, his father had given up hope of his son ever entering a proper profession. In desperation he sent Peter to his uncle, who had returned from the Far East long after the war with a Chinese bride and samples of her father’s silk, and made a fortune selling cloth to fuel the post-rationing fashion explosion.

His uncle soon realised that Peter was a born aesthete, and sent him out with a constantly changing supply of new colours and weaves to sell to the boutiques that kept springing up on and around Chelsea’s King’s Road.

When he met her, Sylvie was working as a dressmaker at Bazaar, Mary Quant’s Chelsea shop selling the miniskirts and sharp-cut clothes in big bold prints that made the couturier’s name.

“Sylvie loved the feel of my uncle’s cloths,” Peter said. “It was finer than any silk she’d come across before. Whenever I was passing she would rush out from her workroom in the back to run my samples through her fingers.”

But the brash young Quant wasn’t interested in the feel of cold, clinging waves of smoothness on the skin. Her eye was on colour and pattern: bold, bright, and primary; a million miles from the delicacies and subtlety of Peter’s silks. One day Sylvie was so excited when she heard Peter’s voice, so eager to get to him before Quant sent him on his way for wasting her time, that in her rush she tore the dress she’d been working on for a show that evening; Quant dismissed her on the spot.

“She stood there,” he said, “on the King’s Road, her shoulders hitching themselves in tiny convulsions as she bawled her eyes out. I’d cost her her job, just because I got turned on watching her threading the slick fabric through her fingers, kneading it in her palms, running it over feint blue veins that pulsed under the porcelain skin of her wrists. I felt awful. I’d used her. It had cost me nothing – I never sold anything to Bazaar so I didn’t care a jot if I lost their business – but it had cost her everything.

“Then I realised what I could do to make it up to her. ‘Come back to my place,’ I said. She had nowhere to be, after all. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she replied. ‘I live a hundred yards from here,’ I said. ‘I keep a roll of all our silks in the flat. We can spend the afternoon there. You can see them all, and the ones you like the best you can have. You can make your own dresses from them and start your own shop.’”

She went back to his flat. They spent the afternoon throwing roll after roll of silk on the floor. Together they explored the texture of every cloth. Afternoon became evening and they began to drink wine. As the alcohol dampened their sensitivity they started taking off clothes to expose more and more skin to the fabric. By the time evening had turned to night they were naked and the layers and contours of their bodies were inseparable from the folds and hollows of the cloth.

“She left just before morning. She was gone before I woke, before I could help her carry her pick of the fabrics, so she left with nothing. My father found out I’d been involved in an altercation in one of London’s most respected boutiques and stormed into my uncle’s office. My uncle managed to convince him to let me stay in the business on the condition that I didn’t set foot near the King’s Road again. A man in his position couldn’t afford that sort of publicity. A man in my uncle’s position rather liked the publicity, so instead of sending me to Harrogate as my father had hoped, he set me up with an office in Paris.

“I never saw Sylvie again. At the end of the 70s my uncle found out through his connections that she had a son, Michael, and a few years later a daughter, Claire. She died in 1974. That was the last I heard of any of them until I saw Michael on the television one day. He was still using Sylvie’s name, Tyler, and there was something about him that made me feel I was looking at an old photo of myself.”

“His hair,” I said, speaking for the first time. “I knew there was something familiar when I saw you in the lift. You and Michael have the same hair.”

He took a sip of beer, looked as if he were thinking for a moment, and laughed.

“That’s it!” he said. “You’re right. He had my hair. Anyway, I could never speak to him as myself, so I became Greenhamgal, and you know the rest.”

The image of Sylvie, wrapped in silk, took over my mind. Seeing her, consumed by the touch, the taste, the cold smell and slow, sliding hiss of silk on her skin, I knew that something hypnotic had entered Claire’s genes and I understood, just a little, why I had fallen in love with a woman I’d seen only once, on the other side of a window.

“Here.” Peter’s voice startled me, and I wasn’t sure whether it was from tiredness or too much beer or daydreams of Sylvie. “Take my card. Call me when you want to talk some more.” I took the card. The only thing written on it was a number, in purple on the palest spearmint. The card was thick and handmade, shot through with the finest threads of what could only be silk.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, and added: “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“That I couldn’t tell you anything about Claire.”

I opened my mouth to ask him something but instead I just smiled.

As soon as I hit my bed I started crying. Caught in the sticky web of the seconds before sleep, I understood exactly the delirium of the New Year celebrations. It wasn’t about the innocent glee of the unknown. It was about a hope born of relief: that a part of the past was over; that tomorrow’s pain would, even at its worst, be different from yesterday’s.