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That was it, no more Hipster dating for her. Sure, it could be fun, not often in life that her seven stone frame came with a weight advantage, but after the incident in her physiotherapist’s office, that was it for her. She needed to date men with meat on their bones, that didn’t look like a skeleton bisected in the middle with a pair of Calvin Klein underpants when they tugged their skinny jeans off. Her physiotherapist was partly to blame though – who adorns their life size medical skeleton with a goatee and a Che Guevara bandana around the neck?

It was time to date a different class of man, a man for whom the word grooming was only to be applied to an unruly overlarge dog, and only then ever in the sentence “I would never send my unruly overlarge dog for grooming”.

It was possible though that she might have gone the teensiest bit far the other way.

This was not just a beard, it was a neck-beard. Not even that, it wasn’t merely a beard combined with neck-bard, this was a beard-neck-beard combined with a beard-beard sandwiched between a pair of ear-beards. She was – honest to God – sitting down for a Chinese opposite a man who could have starred in the National History Museum’s special top of the pops exhibit for the world’s hairiest Neanderthal.

There were eyes that twinkled as he laughed, and a nose so small and pink that only the word nubbin would do. At least she thought it was a nose, and this was based upon its approximate location relative to the point at which he was inserting spring rolls. The size of his beard, it was perfectly possible he was stocking up on food for winter.

But, oh God. The hair on his face. What about the hair on the rest of his body? You can say what you like about hipsters, but excessive drag in a wind tunnel is not one of them.

People stared as they left the restaurant, and he made the joke: Beauty and the Ogre. She felt she deserved some degree of credit for almost making it through the goodnight kiss. How bad could it be? Squeeze her eyes shut, channel the memory of her Nana Duncan coming in for one of her scratchy chin specials, and goodnight. She blamed her brother for the minor panic attack, for that time he wrapped her in the prickly wool blanket and it went across her whole face and she could barely breathe.

The next evening she was sitting with a cocktail, lamenting her lot, when – for the first time in her life – her jaw dropped. This guy. This guy she was staring at. He was tall, he was well built, and oh God, the face. She knew full well on a scale of one to ten she was a fourteen, but she found herself going over to him, tummy trembling that for the first time in her life he was out of her league.

She asked if she could buy him a drink. He crinkled up his eyes and asked her wasn’t that supposed to be his line?

They clicked. They sat down together and they passed two wonderful hours and she felt moved enough to tell him that no one was ever going to believe this. That the two of them, these beautiful people, and they had the beautiful personalities to match, how likely was that?

He looked at her, his twinkling eyes filling with sadness above the nubbin of his perfect nose.

He sighed, then said, ‘Yes, it’s why I wear the beard on first dates.’

Up here the houses look like butter wouldn’t melt on their doorsteps. They may be built upon wealth accrued from broken bones but they don’t like to offend the neighbours.

It was a routine call, a fifteen backs an hour, missing persons job in Cyncoed. I parked my coupe outside 117 Briarwood Drive and approached across a lawn you could roll sushi on. A peacock carved out of a bush eyed me suspiciously, I threw it a placatory nut.

My client AB Vanderstadht was as well-groomed as the grass. His beard had a distressing symmetry and tapered into one of those moustaches where the ends point up like a dead man’s boots. His shiny brogues and worsted tweeds suggested that he’d had spent too much time in lindy-hop class.

He offered me a drink, I asked for scotch, he bought Martini.

“Now Mr Marlowe” he said jerking a pointy moustache tip at a fawn leather chaise longue as an indication that I should sit, “My wife is a highly strung creature, from a highly placed family, I can’t afford to let her out of my sight.”

His concern for her welfare was admirable but I wished he was less gushing.

He handed me her photograph. She wasn’t so good looking. Her face wouldn’t stop any more traffic than an overturned oil tanker in the Brynglas tunnel.

Her hair was an ash blonde that came from the kind of bottles you couldn’t buy in Boots and her languid expression was the kind I had only seen on a certain kind of woman before. The kind whose middle name was trouble.

“Dominique De Chatelet- Vanderstadht” said the moustache twitchily noting my excitement.

“You’ll understand my concern, I’m no ogre, she has no reason to hate me, we have an arrangement. She has her predilections, the gambling, the reefers, the unsalubrious friends and I have…. mine. So you see it’s unlikely that she is trying to escape my clutches.”

I wasn’t so sure. In my experience a frail of this type may have any number of reasons for skipping town, especially if married life was proving as disappointing as an eighties band’s reunion concert.

“Mr Vanderstadht can you tell me where your wife was last seen please?” I asked.

An hour later I was down by the river, where the houses are packed together like mackerel in a tin and instead of taming nature they just let the rats take over.

Welcome to Grangetown, my kind of town.

I was standing between two overfilled bin bags whose contents were spread across the pavement amidst pools of vomit and rainwater. I regarded the brown glass doors of Yang’s Chinese Restaurant, established 1972, last repainted 1973. It’s red-tiled Pagoda style roof had seen better days and several of its once-cream tiles had fallen off the wall.

I tentatively stepped into the lobby to the music made by police sirens. Inside was a Chinese Matriarch of no more than 130 years old who regarded me with a cold suspicious eye.

“I’m looking for a broad” I said.

But then again wasn’t I always?

Becky closed her eyes and drank in the stillness. Nothing but the gentle slap of water in the pool, birdsong, the smell of coconut suntan oil and the warmth of the Greek sun beating down.

Her book lay waiting to be read, a cool lemonade glistened invitingly at her side, the perfect afternoon stretched out ahead of her.

And then his voice drifted across from the bar again and everything inside Becky tensed.

“Lads, lads let’s get shots. In Marbella I drank 30 shots all before breakfast and then we went water-skiing. Stavros, or whatever, 4 shots of Ouzo each for me and the lads.”

Becky looked up as Stavros - who was actually called Darius - lined up 16 shot glasses and filled them from the giant glass bottle on the bar. It was 11 in the morning.

They had arrived the day after Becky, shattering whatever dreams she had had of a peaceful break. The other people at the hotel were retired couples, single women, grown-up children with their parents. And now this bunch of ogres.

To be fair, the other three weren’t half as bad as Kyle from Smethwick, who strode about wide-legged, open-mouthed, perpetually bellowing and wearing a t-shirt with his own face on it.

As the group knocked back their shots, Darius caught Becky’s eye and she flushed, as much at the behaviour of her compatriots as at Darius’ chiselled jaw, enhanced by the topiary of his finely manicured beard. It got her every time and she dreamed of winding her fingers through it as cicadas chirruped in the hot Greek night...

Becky smiled apologetically and Darius grinned at her, turning his attention back to his customers. They were grimacing stickily around mouthfuls of aniseed liquor.

“Didn’t touch the sides lads” lied Kyle “Let’s have another four and see who can make the biggest bombs in the pool. In Marbella I made the water shoot out of the pool so hard it hit the roof of the bar and the barmaid was so impressed she gave me a blowjob every night.”

“Kyle, I just fancy chilling out by the pool for a bit. No more shots, alright?”

“Sorry mate, thought this was your fortieth, not your eightieth, right lads? Right? Ok Stavros twelve Ouzos and a lemonade for the pussy. Stavros, any chance there’s a decent Chinese around here?”

“Lemonade for me too please mate.”

“And me - maybe a beer later though”

And so Kyle was left to down his shots alone, which he did as loudly and obnoxiously as he did everything else in life.

Did Becky imagine Darius pulling a tiny bottle from his pocket, adding a drop of amber liquid to Kyle’s shots as he turned to hit his friend with his penis?

Was it really the bar’s heavily watered Ouzo that made Kyle slump, suddenly silent, on a sunlounger before he could demonstrate his famous pool bomb?

And, as he slipped into a heavy doze, would his friends really have taken photos of the wet patch spreading slowly across the front of Kyle’s trunks?

Becky couldn’t be certain of any of these things, but as peace returned to the poolside, she was certain that Darius shot her a slow, sexy wink and ran a finger along the edge of his distressingly attractive beard

It isn't the place, it's the sentiment that counts; that's what Laura had said.

She had bitten down a little on that word - sentiment - like the false flag for feeling that it was. But he’d appreciated it anyway. It was vaguely comforting to think that this encounter might have some emotional substance.

Still, the location wasn't easy on the senses. A dilapidated Chinatown restaurant in the old-fashioned way, all gaudy yellow signage and fiercely red chickens. The greeting was perfunctory; the heat inside an unwelcome blast of generic sweet-and-sour. They were handed sticky plastic menus. An unlikely place for an epiphany.

"Just try to relax," said Laura. "He's the one who asked for this. You don't have to do anything or say anything you don't want to."

"I know, I know." I fidgeted with a serviette and the waiter brought beer. The place was loud, too: a dozen conversations competed with the rattle of an old air-conditioner next to the bar. The next table was uncomfortably close, a tattooed woman and a hipster guy with a distressingly oily beard.

And then he was there, pushing past the staff and straight through to us with a grin the size of a dinner plate. I just had time to take in the sheer size of him - always an ogre of a man, he now had the muscles to match, displayed in a t-shirt with high-cut sleeves - before he swallowed me in a choking embrace.

“Trev, my old mate Trev!” he gushed.

“Dad.”

We ordered Menu C without fanfare. After that, I think I’d expected ritual. I’d thought that after six years, some formal restart button might need to be pressed before we could tackle families, children et al with the proper degree of wistful introspection. Instead it all came at once - his jobs, his ambitions, me, the reasons it had all fallen apart, how he wished it could have happened differently but that was just the way things went sometimes.

And then I asked whether he had seen Mum before she died, and he stopped dead.

“Oh, Trevor. You know. I mean, you know.”

He sat like that for a long time, rapping his knuckles together. He seemed distracted, irritated by the couple on the next table.

“Can we talk about this later?” he said.

“It was just a question.”

In the gap that followed, the hipster guy threw back his head, laughed and said something.

Dad turned. “What did you say?”

“Nothing, mate,” the guy said. “Nothing to you. We were just chatting.”

I felt my whole body tense, the way it used to; the way I remember it doing so many times in that damned house when the plates were dirty or the food overcooked, or when nothing at all was happening and we just wanted out.

“I heard you,” Dad said. “I know what you were talking about.”

I pulled Laura’s sleeve: time to go. She whispered that I should say something, don’t let it end like this. But the air was too cloying and the noise unbearable, and I knew I had to get out, and that once I did, I couldn’t return.