“I know my lines. I think I do.”

“Okay, rolling. Rolling, okay.”

Kate posted versions of the same Insta reel every day. The caption was always the same: “Confronting my husband when he’s cheated on me.” He had never cheated on her. They had a three-bedroom cottage in buff limestone just outside Stroud. Their cottage was bordered with lavender. The lavender bushes were dusty green and lilac and thick with bees. The bees were generally kind. They had a daughter, six months old, called Kayleigh. Kayleigh had begun to star alongside her mother and father in “Confronting my husband when he’s cheated on me” reels; she had, as yet, no lines. Lewis liked cars and military history and empty gyms and YouTube videos about snowboarding and was trying to get into craft beers. He drove a Subaru Impreza RS in cobalt blue with a spoiler he admitted was ludicrous, and loved. He loved that it wasn’t the sort of car a dad should have. He’d graduated from nightclubbing rugby lad at school to responsible family man with ease, thanks to a confidence on which he’d always been able to rely. His life, until now, had always been tonally ‘Yes—sure—go on then.’

Kate was holding Kayleigh, dandling her. Naked in a nappy patterned with yellow ducklings—Kayleigh, not Kate. Kate, not Kayleigh, said, “I spoke to your other woman. Yeah. Yeah.”

“What are you talking about?” Lewis replied, entering the kitchen from the front door. They stood in the spots she had marked on the floor with crosses of tape.

“Oh don’t you give me that, Lewis. I’m not fucking thick. You can’t hide this anymore—I’ve spoken to her.” She bounced the baby aggressively.

“You sound mad right now. You sound like someone off Eastenders. I’ve no idea what you’re going on about.”

“You do Lewis, you do! You with this fucking slag in Gloucester. Leaving home at midnight. Getting back at six a.m. I know all about it. Leaving your little baby girl here, leaving your wife. Well it ends now, d’you understand? I’ve spoken to her. She didn’t know you had a family. She’s as disgusted with you as me.”

Lewis began to laugh uncontrollably.

“Lewis. Lewis. Lewis! Lewis. You can’t corpse again. For god’s sake Lewis. Lewis! You’re ruining it. We’ve got to shoot it all over again.” Still holding Kayleigh she darted to her phone on the tripod and tapped its screen.

“I’m sorry. It’s just you saying “this fucking slag in Gloucester.” It just sounds so strange coming out of your mouth.” He kept laughing, and, confused, with the bouncing having suddenly ceased, Kayleigh started to cry.

“Oh. Look. Come here baby,” said Kate.

“Let me take her.”

“No, I’ve got—”

“C’mon. Let me.”

Without pausing for her assent he took his daughter, and she brightened, her pink mouth bubbling with delight, shaking her little folded hands, and reaching at his beard.

“This will cause a continuity error.”

“Let’s leave it for tonight. I’ll make some dinner.”

“Lewis. No. We need to post. We’re very low on the content backup. I’ve got all the reels scheduled but only for another week.”

“Come on, Kate. I’ll make tacos. Fish tacos.”

“Fish tacos—hello? I had tacos for lunch. No, we need to reshoot.”

“We don’t need to this second, Kate.” Lewis took Kayleigh to her crib by the TV, and gave her big-cat mobile a push so that the tigers and jaguars and lions jiggled and danced. He crouched down to lean into the crib. Then he glanced up. Kate was watching them. Her eyes registered her husband and her daughter in the same way facial recognition software verifies a face. He turned back; reached into the crib again. Kayleigh gurgled at the big cats, batting towards them. She looked like Winston Churchill. A beautiful tiny Winston Churchill who was not responsible for the Gallipoli Campaign.

It seemed Kate was unimpressed with her prime-ministerial child. She did not come over to play with her and her mobile and her husband who loved them both so dearly, and he reflected now that her dandling had been begrudging. Lewis didn’t wish to think of her like that. But she had very recently changed. The lure of the worldwide response to her content had meant discontent with her home life, where only he, Lewis, could praise and laud her, and where her tiny daughter most often offered distressed tears.

She said, “Come on Lewis,”—her voice softening—“we only have to film a little more. We can be done in half an hour. Forty minutes max. Come on. We’ll just do this and have the tacos. For me, please?”

“This isn’t how I imagined every evening after getting back from the site. Let’s do some more tomorrow, right? I know it’s important to you.”

“Lewis, it freaks me out when you say that.”

“Come and look at our daughter.”

“As if you don’t really care about my success.”

“I’m proud of you. Two hundred kay followers is impressive. I am proud of you.”

“It’s started to bring in a considerable income. You know?”

Behind him in her pink cardie Kate was pacing the kitchen. She came to the island and paused, resting her hands on it restlessly. Then she took her own elbows into her arms, half an embrace, half a strop. Then she went over to the window and looked out into the garden, where sunset was still a few hours off, their small, pleasant, pebbled garden of lavender and olive trees, lead planters and paving stones. Lewis had put it together. He’d never felt as proud as that until the day Kayleigh had been born.

“You’re not replying to me,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I’m just trying to get across that I’m not in the mood, Kate. Is that all right? Long day, want to play with Kayleigh and cook you guys dinner. That all right?”

“Well she can’t eat tacos and I’ll have to be breastfeeding her so I can hardly see how you’ll make her dinner.”

“It’s a figure of speech.” He rose from his crouch, filling the room, his head near the cottage’s ceiling.

“Funny, I don’t know the figure of speech where you say you’ll make a six-month-old baby dinner and you actually can’t because she doesn’t eat food.”

“All right.”

“What? All right what?”

“I don’t want to argue.”

“You can’t give me literally half an hour of your time?”

“Let it go.”

He looked at her, as if anew, as if with sight of her for the first time—as if he didn’t know her. Kate’s eyelids had a strained, twitching fullness. She stared. Equal parts of him wanted to take her into his arms and hold her forever, and to simply break her. He acted on neither impulse. Instead he took up Kayleigh from her crib, at which she made a murmurous whimper, like some puppy left alone. He told Kate it was time for Kayleigh’s bath. She didn’t speak. She watched him and he turned and took his daughter and went up the stairs.

*

The following day as it happened he was again bathing Kayleigh, again just before dinner, and Kate spoke, sliding against the bathroom doorframe.

“Lewis. Lewis. Excuse me.”

“What’s up Kate?”

“It’s just that you said. You promised.”

“What?”

She came forward and laced her hands around his shoulders, around his neck. He had his own on Kayleigh’s shoulders. They were like a symbol of chained infinity. “That we’d resume filming. Content creation.”

“Kate, really?—I’m in the middle of this.”

“I know. Just as soon as you’re done.” Her sweet voice had a curated quality. Manicured, skin-cared. Filtered. Taut.

“Yeah. Not sure when that will be.”

“Just don’t be too long. I’ll be downstairs.”

Lewis didn’t reply.

“Okay?”

“Hm.”

“Okay? Not too long?”

“Yeah, yeah whatever.”

“See you.”

She slipped away with the slinking lupinity of a conniving dog, a coyote or dingo, eyeing him to the last. He literally shook his head. Kayleigh was still and trusting in the bath. He said, “Hey baby, hey baby baby,” lifting her a little, and she responded by bashing her hands into the shallow bathwater, all giddiness and glee. Lewis placed a spume of baby-safe bubbles on her head. She loved it. She tried looking up, and giggled, and the giggle loudened and rolled and became a full rocking fit of laughter; she laughed hard, as her father once had. He loved her wet glistening skin in apple and peach, the flabby folds where her wrists joined her hands, the soft gummy smile, the bridgeless simian nose. She just had a purity about her.

Downstairs, later, nightfall, Kayleigh tentatively sleeping, they were back at the video. Kate with a gaze of zealous intensity. She was saying:

“No, not at all. You’re not convincingly mad at me. You don’t sound mad at all. Your heart isn’t in it. I’m catching you in the act of something. That’s when people are most mad—to be found in a lie. You’re cornered see, and so you’re throwing everything at me. All options.”

“Can’t this just be like every other time?”

She had the conviction of a director. “No Lewis. No. We need to keep the views up. People will get bored. Their attention is so fractured. They move on. We need to up the ante.”

“Hang on—when did you get a ring light?”

“Just recently. It just came.”

“Aren’t they expensive?”

“It was on offer.”

“People will surely think, like, why has she set up a ring light if she’s confronting her husband about cheating?”

“Let’s just go from the top shall we.”

He sighed testily. She glared as he went outside, in order to come in again. He shut the door. He opened the door.

“And where have you been at this time of night?”

“Kate?”

“You weren’t in bed. I’ve been sitting up this whole time.”

“I needed to get some air,” he said, unconvincing in two different ways.

“Bullshit Lewis. Bullshit,”—here Kate’s voice cracked in a realistic imitation of despair—“I’m not a fucking idiot, Lewis. I know you’ve been seeing somebody. I know you have.”

“I’ve just been on a drive. I fancied a drive.”

“At three o’clock in the morning? A drive? I’m not a fucking idiot Lewis. I texted her.”

She dangled her phone over the kitchen island, an inch from the surface, then let it fall. Its rubber case sounded a dim sound that stopped the world. With one finger, as self-righteous as possible, and with just as much faux self-pity, Kate slid the phone over to him. He didn’t pick it up: didn’t need to.

“So you’re texting other people behind my back now?”

“Excuse me, Lewis? You’re fucking other people behind my back.”

He spoke over her, past her. “How do you think that makes me feel?”

“How do you think that makes me feel?”

“We just don’t understand each other anymore, all right Kate? Isn’t that obvious to you? Has there been anything special between us in so long?”

“We went to Malta last summer. Malta. We have a baby daughter.”

“A daughter I sometimes feel I’m the only parent of.”

“You’re horrific. You’re disgusting. Disgusting.”

Lewis’s voice shifted. Fell to normality. “What’s next?”

“That’s sort of it. There isn’t an ending. There doesn’t need to be.”

“You don’t wanna storm out or throw a glass of water on me?”

“Oh, we could try the water. I’ll edit this out. Okay, thanks.”

Kate took a pint glass from the cupboards and went over to their smart fridge, filling it with six ice cubes and cold water.

“Ice cubes? Really necessary?”

“No, oh, sorry—just habit. But they’ll look good, won’t they, on the footage?”

“Guess so.”

“Okay, are you ready?”

“Ready.”

“I’m just gonna do some improv. Okay let’s go. Okay. Listen you fucking—you think you can just do anything to this family. I forgave you once already!” She rose to great convincing heights. “Already I forgive you, and you do this—”

“Kate—”

“No don’t you dare!” and she threw the water at him in a long, curtained arc, top down, the ice cubes succeeding the water. His grey quarter zip took the liquid darkly. “Perfect for the camera,” she said, gesturing to this. “Grey’s perfect.”

“Isn’t there going to be a continuity problem—you appear with the water suddenly. It wasn’t in your hand before.”

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck, you’re right. No, we’ve got to do it again. Can you go and dry off? Can you have a shower, and get dressed again, and we’ll shoot another time.”

“I think that’s enough, Kate.”

“What? What?”

“I’m going to go to bed.”

“Please Lewis. For me.”

Once more he looked at her, feeling that he had entered a period of their shared life in which he was looking at her more truly than he ever had—with less dreaminess, or hope, or laissez-faire love, feeling perhaps for the first time compunctions, misgivings. This was because Kate’s appearance had changed, her very physiognomy, as the brow and mouth might carry the repeated impressions of a smile or scowl, worn in, the rutted ground of repetitious emotion or anyhow the response to repetitious emotion. Truthfully he disliked the turn her mien had taken, though he did not know it, and would not knowingly accredit the now-pleasurelessness of looking at his wife to any decision either of them had ever made, nor any fault of their personalities. No—sometimes change occurred, without fault or feat. He only wished (though again not knowingly) that this heritable turn would bypass their daughter. These were feelings of dull agony that did not come to him as thoughts: more like headache, or thirst, or an undiagnosed cancer of the bowel.

*

Grey squirrels everywhere. They’d taken Kayleigh out to the park. She was too young for the park, nine months old. Bipedality was about to become the rest of her life, but swings and slides were as yet beyond her. From the pushchair her hands reached out to the sky and every new object.

“Just think about it,” Kate was saying.

“No. It’s really getting out of hand.” Lewis pushed Kayleigh onwards, as if away from her mother.

“But we’re doing so well. Four-hundred-thousand followers. We’re making money. Please. Please, Lewis. This is important to me. I don’t have the privilege of fulfilling work like you.”

“You could find a fulfilling job.”

“But this is a job. Don’t you get that? That this is what life’s like now? This is work. How many people are employed and making money doing social media all across the world? Millions? Every company has them. Every brand. Multiple people. You think the Insta posts of Mercedes or BBC Good Food just appear? Someone’s paid. Some creative is doing all that.”

She was stalking behind them, rangy, desperate, bizarre in her speech. Pleading—she was doing pleading, and it was not part of her usual emotive repertoire. Lewis looked at the sky, then the ground. Kayleigh chortled at a squirrel as it corkscrewed up a tree.

“Respond to me please,” Kate said, bounding in front of them.

“I just think that this is getting out of hand. It’s the same thing every day. Definition of madness they say. And can it be good for you, for us, to replicate a breakup? To go through the motions of me cheating on you—doesn’t that somewhere deep down put the idea in your head? You’ll start believing yourself.”

“I would never believe you were a cheat, Lewis.”

“I know. But it might affect your view of me if we have a screaming match every night.”

“Oh come on, hardly every night. I do batch them up. It’s twice a week at most.”

“You just care about surface. It’s all about screens and engagement now.”

“Life is about surface!” she said. It sounded to him like a manifesto. Something rallying and deeply believed.

At this—beyond, almost, his will—Lewis gripped the pushchair so forcefully that its plastic cracked and splintered, grazing his palms. His freckled forearms shook. Kayleigh hadn’t been disturbed by the noise, continuing to reach for the animals. But he chose to cap his physicality with words:

“Listen to me now Kate. Listen. I’m not fucking doing this again. You’re acting like someone with a personality disorder. You think that that’s the real world. When have you last played with our daughter? Our newborn baby? She’s nine months old, Kate. You ignore her. You’re obsessed with viewing statistics and engagement rates on Instagram. Obsessed. You’re like your mother. Obsessive. It’s pathetic to see you like this. To see how you’ve become. So I’m being as firm as I can now, and as honest as I can, to see if it might knock some fucking sense into your head. Because this is unhealthy. It’s really unhealthy, and I would like my wife and best friend back. Got it?”

It was at last too much for her. Kate moved away from him abruptly, and, with gathered dignity, replying nothing, walked out of the park, not fast, not slow, but certainly not with any suggestion that she might be tempted to turn back.

*

One morning, when Kayleigh’s first birthday was imminent, and he’d finished his party prep, Lewis was woken by blue light from under the door of their bedroom ensuite. Even such a small strip illuminated half the room. He listened. Soft clicking. Typing.

He slid his feet out onto the hardwood floor he always said he meant to sand. (When could you, and not wake the baby? Life now lacked intervals.) And he found himself wanting to tiptoe. In your own home? So as not to alert your own wife? His eyes stung. The new default: fatigued and somewhat in pain and maximally frazzled. He gave up trying to be quiet and depressed the ensuite doorhandle and opened the door as you usually would—as if you didn’t think your wife was inside.

Kate was, sitting on the toilet seat, her knees together, her ankles apart, her laptop, as intended, on her lap. The wild digital glare uplit her face, like a child with a torch telling campfire ghost stories.

“Lewis!” she said, in the same tone he’d said, “Kate!” when she’d caught him wanking (without her) a fortnight earlier. In the same moment she folded her laptop lid, but did not shut it entirely. No—she did not seem entirely committed to the idea that she should feel guilt.

“What are you doing?” He knew what she was doing—it was a thing to say, some filler for all the new space between them.

“I’m just, with Kayleigh’s birthday coming up, I’m just catching up on some editing time. We’re both so overworked.”

“You’re doing Instagram.”

“Yes—well, editing the videos, yeah.”

“It’s like three, four in the morning.”

“I know but I’m not tired. I’ve hardly been sleeping.”

“I am tired.”

“I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“It isn’t that.”

“What?”

“It’s—you know what? Never mind. Go for it. Just go for it. All good.”

“Lewis?”

“Why do you seem to feel so lonely with me?” he said, calmly, but not gently. “Look, you can go anywhere in a relationship so long as you’re hopeful about the next steps—about where you’re headed together. Anything else you can bear if you’ve got that. I don’t have that, Kate. I don’t have that hope right now.”

Very deliberately he took hold of the doorhandle and closed her into the bathroom.

*

Weeks later, at another 3 a.m., Lewis pulled up shoddily in their driveway and brushed his car along the lavender. He could barely get out, having to edge the door open and edge through the plants. Using his phone torch, he led himself to the front door.

“Jesus Christ.” He jumped on seeing her. Kate was there, awake, in the darkness, sitting at the kitchen island, lit only by her ring light.

She opened her laptop. He could see more now. Her weeks-unwashed hair; how her spaghetti vest hung from her like seaweed from a corpse. It was too early for much colour but Lewis could see the red strain to her eyes, and her pupils vast and roaming. He flicked the lights on.

“Where have you been?”

“Out.”

“I’m filming.”

“You’re what?”

“This is perfect. It’ll seem more realistic. We need to make some more content please.”

“You’ve literally gone mental. What are you doing up?”

“What are you?”

“I said I was out.”

“Where?”

“Having an affair.”

“Ha!” Her laugh was a sole sound, hideously loud.

“I’m serious.”

“What?”

“Are you really filming?”

“Yes.”

“I was out having an affair. Cheating on you. Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“You cheated on me?” She rose from her stool and came around the island to him and he saw her bottom half now, naked. Not having dressed—sleepwalking? But her eyes moved too much. They were seeing. She was awake.

“You’re not wearing any clothes.”

“You cheated?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I did. With Angela.”

“With Angela. With Angela.”

“Yes.”

And Kate snapped into a second tier of concentration. “You did what? You fucking—you fucking cunt Lewis? You’re sneaking out at night having an affair with that dirty fucking tart? You think you’re a big man don’t you, when you’re just a fucking piece of shit. Disgusting. Despicable. I’m always left here alone. To earn money for us. Pulling my hair out, overworked. No help at all from you. No help. Nobody helps Kate. Kate is alone.”

“Want to know why I did?”

“Why, why?”

“Because I’m alone. So don’t try and claim that for yourself. I feel most lonely when I’m with you. It’s the only time I feel lonely. I feel closed off and horrific. You, my wife, the woman I married, make my life feel worse. Every day of it. But I love you for it, because I feel closer to Kayleigh. In fact I feel like her. Unable to get the words out. Unable to express all the discontent. There’s no way to do it.”

“So you cheat on me?”

“Yes. I needed some way to get you to listen.”

She shifted again, from deranged rage to a jittery glee. Her eyes were the same: restless. She said, “Okay okay, this is really really great. This is one of our best reels yet. I mean that.”

“This isn’t a reel.”

“Let’s keep going.”

“Kate.”

“Come on. What if we try the water thing again? How about that?” She bolted towards the fridge. Lewis moved to her, placing a hand on her shoulder. He took her into a hug from behind. She was shaking.

“Kate,” he repeated.

“This isn’t right. This isn’t in character. You’re being too kind.”

“I’m not in character.”

“You need to keep shouting so we can keep the tension up. Please.”

“Don’t make me shout at you after what I’ve done to you.”

“Shout please, let go of me, shout please. Please Lewis. We need to get back to this. We have half a million followers! Half a million! A small country—can you imagine? Wow. This will keep us going forever. This is our life. We’ve made a future for Kayleigh.”

“Kate.”

“Let’s go.” She wrenched herself away from him with straitjacket movements. “Okay. Okay” She screamed: “You fucked her? With me at home with the baby?” Which, resonant and piercing, of course woke Kayleigh, who screamed back from above them.

“Kate,” he shout-whispered. “You’ve woken her up. Shut the fuck up.”

Choices came to him: one was to coax her into the car and get to a hospital. And what would they say? Yes, an episode, have some tablets; or else a waiting list for the next two years. By which time?

But, with the selfishness of paternity, he knew he needed to protect his daughter. His wife and all the world they’d had together receded to a faint terror, terror at the loss of so much so needlessly, at the ludicrously sudden developments in life, at the thin thread between an existence worth having and one of impossible pain. It was discovering that thinness which pushed him on—he understood now that callous acts were one way of supervising fear. And that fear was embodied in his little baby. It felt somehow perfect that the ultimate in horror looked like the ultimate in beauty. Yes—it was his soul upstairs, crying at her mother’s crying, and he was going to make her all right, all better: loved, and cuddled, coddled, not scared, safe.

He said nothing and left Kate in the kitchen, heading up the steep stairs of their cottage with his hands on the narrow walls, taking three steps at once, almost pulling himself towards her. She was in his arms the next moment. Her crying subsided.

Kayleigh. He took her down towards the car out the back door, not glancing at Kate, because how could he? And then he tucked Kayleigh into her car seat with her pink bunny and closed shut the door and waded through the lavender to the driver’s seat and reversed, and Kate was too slow, and Kayleigh was crying because she was scared, wasn’t she?—because her mummy was banging the glass.

Duty was facing fear, not overcoming it. You still had to have it. No duty without sacrifice. Fear would never let up. Yes—truth was, he was more scared to leave Kate than to stay.

*

Some time later, living with Kayleigh at Mum’s, Lewis was sleepless in the middle of the night and decided to unblock Kate. He did this occasionally. She didn’t post; he wanted to see if there were any clues, any emotional giveaways.

But that evening she had posted. He opened the reel. Their typical set up. In the kitchen. The front door was open. Then Kate started to scream. She started to scream about infidelity to the open door. You couldn’t see the man because the door itself blocked whoever was there. But Lewis realised it was monologue. His voice wasn’t arguing with her: nobody’s was. There was nobody at the door. She was all alone. Imagining, alone, she was being cheated on, alone. It was the end of the reel. Kate said his name. And she slammed the door on nothing—on shadow, on experience, on a past which she could not now understand, nor from which she could ever return.

*

*

*

Please share this story, or forward the email to a friend or family member you think might like it:

Share

I post these all for free and sharing is a real help. Thank you.

This was the first thing Heather heard on pushing once more through the glass doors of Celebrity Lookalikes and Impersonators Limited. Gareth sounded like he was beginning to believe he was the agent of the originals, not the lookalikes—someone with Hollywood clout and chutzpah. Chunky gold jewellery on his wrists and fingers and neck; his black hair slick as oil; his accent Essex.

She, Heather, was Liza Minnelli, and she knew she was Gareth’s best client. Her business card stated: “All singing, all dancing. The spitting image, a dead ringer.” Not that she needed a business card.

As usual she sat herself on the pleather dining chairs in the tiled space they called the Waiting Room. It was a converted chip shop, still reeking of endlessly recycled grease and the dark corkscrews of fragmentary batter called ‘scraps’ which were, incredibly, a delicacy. Gareth was “going up in the world,” or so they said down his local, and therefore in need of premises. Premises. His MacBook sat on the aluminium counter where the till used to be; Heather sat on the peeling chair dressed in one of Liza’s little red sequined numbers. Her wig itched in the oleaginous air. She’d have to fumigate her wardrobe.

“No, no, Gaddafi will not fucking do, I don’t fucking give a fucking shit if your barber “resembles” him, Michael. No—is Colonel Gaddafi fucking Osama bin Laden, no he fucking ain’t mate, alright? No that isn’t funny. No, it is unfuckinglikely that Gaddafi and bin Laden had a sensual romantic relationship—no they weren’t to my knowledge fucking, no. Get me a bin Laden. Wanker.”

Gareth was using an iPhone, but had been schooled on phones you could slam, so he lowered his reading glasses from his forehead to his nose and banged the phone screen with a finger like a saveloy. He appeared satisfied.

“Alright ‘eather, just the lovely lady I was hoping to see today. How’s things?”

“I’m pretty good thanks Gareth, yeah. Who was that going on about Gaddafi?”

“Just Michael being a prick. Look, I’ve got something for you—oh for fuck, ‘ang on, he’s calling back. What? What? What? I’m talking to a lovely lady right now you facking pillock, what?”

At which moment Frank Sinatra entered the chippy. Short, in a grey crosshatch suit, he wore his hat at such a precipitous angle you felt it would fall off. This was one of the many exaggerations in which a celebrity lookalike had to indulge. She always thought it interesting that you could tell more about the original from the lookalike. In caricature, their lines were more heavily drawn. So she absorbed from this man Frank’s true head, lined and shaped like a sphynx cat, and with a sphynx cat’s glazed blue eyes. His own were contacts.

“Mind if I?” he asked her. “Liza,” he added, smirking, nodding. Heather tapped the dining chair by her side. Its pleather was ripped across, exposing vomit-coloured reconstituted stuffing foam.

“Nice meeting you, Frank.”

“You too doll face.” She laughed. He wasn’t doing an accent. He sounded as stridently humble as she. As English. Heather watched as his gaze flicked down to her shoes, then moved jumpily up her legs, hips, torso. Then he was looking into her eyes. His attention silenced her.

Fortunately he continued: “Getting much work?”

“Enough. Yeah, can’t complain.”

He leaned so that his forearm was on his knee. Somehow it was patronising; she didn’t dislike it. He was leaning into her, over her. “Sing too?”

“Of course.”

“It’s harder if you sing. Obviously more money. But you have to look like and sound like the real thing, right?

“Right. And you get the rabid fans.”

“The rabid fans, yeah. They know every note of every song.”

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Frank Sinatra.”

“Funny.”

“Jason Ferrara.”

“Good name—would make a stage name.”

She noticed that he didn’t ask hers. Behind the counter, now with his feet up where fishcakes once idled, Gareth was shouting about the late Queen Elizabeth II. Apparently a booking hadn’t gone well—she’d looked like the Queen, but sounded like she smoked sixty a day.

Frank was still looking at her. At last he said, “When’s your next gig?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight? Well. I’m free tonight.”

“Why are you in costume then?”

“Oh, I ain’t been here before. Always been solo—never had an agent or anything. Trying to get work. Need to look the part, no? So where’s this gig.”

“Eight at the Lion and Unicorn, Edgerton. You from around here?”

“The Lion and Unicorn—that’s near me. Rough. I don’t go in there. But I’ll make an exception tonight Liza. You do ‘New York, New York’?”

“Course I do. Do you?”

“Yeah. Not as good as you I reckon.”

“You’ll have to judge for yourself.”

“It’s a date.”

*

He wasn’t there. Heather had her virgin gin and tonic (tonic) by the side of the stage and sipped it through a straw, hoping her Liza lipstick wouldn’t rub. Already she’d encountered a beer belly with a mouth who’d approached her to say, “Oi oi it’s Judy Garland.” Not bad—not for a man with twelve drinks in him. But her pixie cut wig was nothing like Judy’s hair.

She opened with ‘Cabaret’, saying “I’d like to sing you ‘Cabaret’ from my film Cabaret based on the musical Cabaret based on the novel Goodbye to Berlin.” Nobody laughed.

The applause was hearty enough, but there wasn’t huge interest. People were getting off, holding court, cadging fags, fixing the wheels of mobility scooters. It was the sort of pub where face tattoos were more than welcome, perhaps fully de rigueur. Windows were open and seagulls squawked in the car park; they couldn’t really have been farther from the sea. England flag bunting, a round of tequila shots. An NHS carer attempting to slide a serviette under the short fourth leg of a table. Heather finished the first half of her set. Then Frank Sinatra entered.

Only he wasn’t Frank now, but Jason Ferrara. Still with the boy’s face and hair, but out of the clothes, and somehow with a different mien, different features. He waded through pub crowds to the bar, leaning forward with his hands together, and tried to order. He had assumed an odd diffidence. All the swagger dispersed with the suit and tie, leaving a small man in a Fred Perry polo. Yet that made her maternal for him, this new vulnerability. It took him a long while to get served. She came over.

“You look a million dollars,” he said, peculiar words in an English accent.

“You look five quid.”

She didn’t mean it cruelly and was glad he laughed.

“Want a drink?”

“I get all mine free.”

“I wanna buy you one anyway.”

“Isn’t that a waste of money?”

“Honey it ain’t wasted if it’s on you. Look at you. You look great.”

“A tonic water then please.”

“Double or single?”

“No, no gin, just the tonic. Slimline.”

“Ah.”

“Watching my weight.”

“But you’re the perfect weight.”

“Exactly. Want to maintain that,” she lied. In fact, she had turned fifty and sensed her body’s natural decay hastening, and even where she dieted there were surprise lumps and slippage. Slimline tonic was a grasp at the idea of youth for her—was a way not to admit of the fear that, for some aspects of her life, it was too late. Heather didn’t drink because she had never experienced love.

Jason got himself a beer and slid her drink along the grimy veneer of the bartop studded with crushed peanuts. “How long you got?”

“Break’s ten minutes. I start again in eight minutes.”

“Enough time for me to ask you then.”

“What?”

“Mine. Dinner. When you free?”

“I’ve eaten.”

“I don’t mean today. I mean in future. At some point. I’d like you to come over. I would like to make a meal for you.”

“I think I’d like that.”

“Think?”

She felt herself blushing. “No. Not think. I know I would.”

He pulled himself up and pulled back his shoulders, as if rising into his excitement. “Great. Great. Any time really. I’m always free. Except when I’ve got a gig, but that isn’t so often. Monday? Let’s say Monday. Seven. I live on this street. 23 Roman Road.”

Heather sipped her sweating tonic. Jason drank in response, demanding she speak next. She said, “How’s work—you busy?”

He took her question at an angle, literally tilting his head, like a puppy, wise in experience, questioning a greater intellect. “Busy’s what you make of it, innit. I’m doing okay. I like it.”

“Is Frank popular?”

“Yeah, he’s always popular. I mean, the people who book me are getting older. Lots of Italians. Italian celebrations, weddings, homecomings. And I’ve had a few charities get me to go into the hospices—y’know how it is. Yeah. They like Sinatra there. It’s comforting for them.”

“Reminds them of the time before they got sick.”

“When they were young, yeah. You ever done it for people with dementia? Well they still think they were twenty-one. I’m singing and they think it’s the sixties, seventies.”

Heather said, “It’s like they’ve skipped out on all the getting old part, and they’re back to it, and they’re happy again, before the disappointments. The aches and pains—mental ones, emotional ones I mean. Yeah. Because there must be, mustn’t there, be a point when you start looking back and you think—god, is this all there’s been? But dementia in a way—I mean, I don’t know anyone who’s suffered from it, but it’s sort of a relief from that. It’s anti-disappointment. It’s terrible for everyone else, but if you can just skip over your problems, overwrite them, and that’s that?”

He had been listening with his eyes over the rim of his pint. He placed it down on the bar now, very deliberately, somewhat musingly. “You’re quite deep aren’t you Liza?” That was his offer to the conversation. A chilling rebuke to her attempt to meet someone on a level that mattered.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think. I’ve never been married. Have you?”

“Not exactly.”

“No?”

He stopped there and she knew he wouldn’t go on. Instead Heather told him she had to get back, prepare for her second half. Jason assented, and inexplicably held her hand, not in the sense of hand-holding, but with a suggestion of fealty. With a suggestion that he would be gallant and subservient and loyal. Again, with a suggestion that he was somehow like a dog, a hound. She climbed the black ramp to the stage; there was no applause.

Might that’ve been the first time she’d felt what she was feeling? Sui generis emotion coupled with sui generis sensation. And the other feeling, the perturbing one that this short brusque man should have inspired so much?

Well, this meant disappointment needn’t be the tonal centre of life. Heather necked her tonic and left it on the corner of the stage. Yes, there was wondrous adventure in every ex-chip shop in the world, and what mattered was your being a blotting paper for the energies more confident than your own. Still the seagulls outside. Jason was talking. She needed to get back into Liza. Singing was the obvious and necessary next step.

Jason watched her closely, and her singing was influenced by his watching, as the entire presentation of your character is always influenced when under observation by someone alluring. Was she finding herself trying harder? Yes—and to look better, more graceful, more unique, more brave.

But as Heather was finishing ‘New York, New York’, her encore, she saw Jason leave the pub by the back door. To smoke? She felt she knew that the answer was no, not to smoke.

*

Heather came to 23 Roman Road on Monday at seven, having spent an hour curling her still-blonde hair, trying to unkink what wearing a wig all day had kinked. She left it half-done and dissatisfied, but passable, and was almost late; she felt she absolutely shouldn’t be late. In one hand she held a bottle of pink bubbles. The cool sleek glass. She rang the bell.

Jason said, “I thought you’d be Liza.”

“But that’s my job,” she laughed, tentatively.

“But well it’s fun though, isn’t it.”

“Me dressing up? You’re not Frank right now.”

“No. It’s fun though. I thought it’d be fun.”

“Well. I love my job.”

“Yeah. This sort of ruins the illusion now though. Can’t be helped I s’pose. Come on.” Jason withdrew his fingers from the doorframe and went inside with his back to her, directly to the kitchen. He did not mention her wine. She twice tried to offer it to him and he twice, staring at her, ignored or failed to see it. So she placed it on the Formica counter, where it seemed too fanciful for his modest singleton’s home, as if itself dressed up, gold foil round the neck, a wavy pink paper label at the waistline.

“We’ll be having carbonara.”

“Oh. Lovely. I love carbonara.”

“Same.”

“Have you got Italian family, Jason? Name like Ferrara.”

He leaned against the fridge. “Probably.”

Silence. She said, “Is it a family recipe?”

“No. Off BBC Good Food.”

“Ah, I love BBC Good Food.”

“Good innit.”

“In the name I suppose.”

“Yeah.”

Heather felt tight in her dress. She felt like sausage in casing. She felt awful. Her hair was all wrong. She hadn’t had time to do her makeup neatly enough, and anyway he didn’t like what he was seeing—that was the transparent fact between them, there as though a wall of stretched cellophane were across the room, which did not stop talk or sight but impeded connection. She sighed.

“I’ve got a beer on the go,” Jason said, but she couldn’t see it. “Want one?”

“I’d rather have wine, if you happened to have any, or a tonic?”

“Don’t do wine. I thought you didn’t drink.”

“I’m drinking today.” She paused. “I brought a bottle.”

“Yeah. Would you open that? I’ll get a glass.”

“Has something happened?”

“What? No. I’m fine.”

“I meant—me?”

Yet she did of course know, had been in the know regarding the same her whole life. It was perhaps the unconscious drive that pushed her to her current profession. Heather, as herself, was dislikable. This she had learned to believe, and now knew as firmly as you know all knowledge. People didn’t like her look, or stance, or manner of speech, or overeager gestures. She had forever been uncomfortable in the world and at fifty had come to recognise it as her own failing, not the failing of ineffable otherness—was, in short, an anxiety she deserved, because she had not succeeded in disinterring herself from it. Heather had only ever wanted to offer herself authentically and the flat words came back time and again: no thank you.

“I had thought you’d be Liza.”

“What does it matter if I’m not Liza.”

“Well I met you as Liza.”

“Yes, but you are aware it’s an act? I met you as Frank but I liked what I saw beyond him.”

“That’s cos you’re a woman.”

“What’s that mean?” She was impatient, and tore at the foil on the neck of her pink champagne. While he was thinking she popped the bottle; she had been given no glass.

“Well just like how women are more into personality, I guess.”

“So you’re not interested in me physically?” She turned as she said this, madly opening cupboards.

“No, Heather. I think you’re good looking.”

“Thanks.” She at last found a glass and poured bubbles to the rim, let them subside, breathed, and poured again.

“But men are more shallow.”

“So you don’t?”

“What?” He sipped his beer, which had materialised, eyeing her with his head tipped back.

“If it’s a matter of shallow that’s physical. You don’t find me attractive.”

“What did I just say? Look, I need to get on with the cooking.”

“All right.”

“Put some music on, there’s my phone.”

She chose the Sinéad O’Connor cover of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. It didn’t connect to any speaker: there didn’t seem to be one: it just played howlingly from his outdated iPhone. Heather suddenly felt it very strange to be listening to music while Jason faffed with pasta. Their conversation was like the conversation you might make with somebody you can’t really hear.

When the carbonara came, a carbonara to which he’d added double cream and grated cheddar, they sat down at his long Ikea table, both on the same side, for there wasn’t room to sit opposite each other in the narrow kitchen. There was a red ceramic pepper at the centre of the table. It had streaks of some condiment on its surface, possibly mayonnaise.

They had the tepid pasta, and dessert, a fruit salad, and then a cold sporadic shag in Jason’s unmade bed.

*

She woke up in beautiful morning. A red sun hazy in the east. It made a play of shadows in red and black about the room. Its light lay red over Jason. Silence twittered with birdsong, the early, more intricate, darting kind.

It was the summer of the heatwave, when people were sleeping in bathtubs of cold water and outside on garden furniture in the night. Mosquitoes came like a modern plague to a country which rarely saw them. People fainted in train carriages. Eight hundred were killed by the weather in three months, and two dozen drowned trying to cool off. Heather left him sleeping. She dressed and went down to the footpath by the railway track.

Rosebay willowherb and too-early blackberries. A pair of tortoiseshell butterflies locked in courtship, flitting in zigzags, one taunting, always pulling away. Heather plucked thistle fluff, and it felt like her late cat’s fur. Buddleias in camp profusion. Ivy with the texture of hairsprayed hair. A woman, likely lost, drove past in a convertible Mazda with a white Monster and fag on the go. Lesser bindweed, cow parsley. Bending spiked translucent rows of summer-grass foxtails. Those which get in dogs’ eyes. Pineappleweed. Hemlock. The maracalike dried seed stalks of curled dock. Razorwire. A sign: No Drone Zone – Overhead Drones Strictly Prohibited. A rough sleeper. Sheep’s sorrel. Baggies. Iridescent greenbottle flies luxuriating on dogshit. Hawthorn, without blossom. Minion graffiti.

They’d agreed she would go to Jason’s gig. But he was doing a care home next, so she skipped it, and he said he had to see her, could he see her? They had drinks in a pub and he didn’t smoke the cigarette she gave him outside; this time they repaired to hers, which felt safer and less safe.

*

Heather’d been seeing him for several months before she consented to see him as Liza. “Not in public,” she’d said. 23 Roman Road again. She wore red and sequins. He opened the door to her, his eyes a little boy’s, his heart impelling him forward.

“Start spreading your legs,” he sang. “I’m cumming today.”

She frowned. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s a joke Hev. Take a joke. Or should I say, Liza!”

“It’s Heather.”

“But you’re the spitting image. Life is a cabaret old chum, innit?”

“Can I come in?”

“Please.”

The moment she was inside and he’d closed the door with a bump of his arse he was upon her, pressing her lumbar into the cold radiator and holding her face with both hands, pushing her back, her head against the mirror in the hallway, one of his legs between her two legs. At least he was proactive—she could at least say that. Jason had a mole on his forehead which looked cancerous. He was almost bald but refused to wear hats, other than Frank’s. He was again wearing the Fred Perry polo he had now worn six times in their courtship; she hadn’t intended to count. His lips were dry with ridged lines on them and too puckered and with flaking white skin as of someone chapped by high winds, yet it was summer and the wind was dead. She felt these flakes of skin through his kisses. It was what she focused on in an attempt to gain control of feeling.

Variations on the same occurred whenever she was Liza.

*

One evening Heather pulled up near Jason’s house. August bank holiday—all the families home, and all the cars in a long neat row on the one side of the street you were able to park. He didn’t have a drive and she couldn’t find a bay. It took a few minutes of slow driving to reach, half a mile away, a place where she could stop. She paused inside, letting the aircon soothe her.

Before dinner she was up in his bedroom. They weren’t clothed, except for his left sock and his boxers round his right ankle. He had two fans going. He had the blinds drawn. Blinds—in the bedroom of an adult. Not curtains. Even drawn they let through huge amounts of light. This was a man impervious to the most obvious sensations. Sweat beaded on his upper lip and his lower, like a ring of blisters. He kissed her and they smudged them into vaguer facial wetness.

His hands came at her and over her and onto her and under her, and, fleetingly, into her. His tongue likewise, but in different places and with different pressure. She replicated his intensity—intensity, not passion—by putting her hands in those locations she felt were apt. She cupped for example the back of Jason’s head, and she reached to his slim-man’s flabby hip, harrying it with hurried fingers. In the background his bedroom TV lit the room mutely.

Heather fled. She had no thoughts about it, only a need which pushed her onwards. She removed her Liza Minnelli wig and threw it to the carpet. Swift and mechanical she found her clothes about the room, dangling off a chair, under the bed, and without mistakes put them on, nothing inside-out, no sleeve caught amidst itself. Just simply and easily. And with as much simple ease and swiftness she, not speaking, ran down the stairs of Jason’s house into his hallway and came to his front door and opened it and left, into the night, where the streetlights of Roman Road were still nostalgic sodium orange, creating their own mist under the peaches and purples of a failing sky. She didn’t even have her shoes on. For the first time, the material realities of life didn’t matter.

Fifty years old she started running into the evening. She hadn’t run or jogged or even exercised at all really, not since school, not since her bronze medal in the relay, when she had benefitted from the athleticism of others, those who were more sure of their bodies and their lives and their place. But she was running now. She was amazed he didn’t follow. She ran on and on, passing the passenger windows of dozens of parked cars, sunset about her, her throat burning, and joy within.

In her car now Heather drove home without music playing. She drove fast. She loved the sunset. She loved the new feeling of driving barefoot, which she had never done before. She had the windows down. She loved the cool of the air whipping into the car and making her seatbelt wild with noise. She loved the colours of the orange lamps going by with increasing frequency, Jason growing further away with each light she counted. She counted over two hundred of them.

*

Four days later Jason Ferrara was at her front door. In two hands he held her black Liza wig.

“Here.”

“You’re returning it?”

“I wanted to see you. The other night.”

“Yes.”

“I get that you weren’t feeling up to it.”

“Yes.”

“You should’ve said.”

“Well it’s hard to articulate. And especially hard to articulate mid-shag.”

“I get that.”

“Do you, Jason?”

“I think I do, yeah.”

“We haven’t ever talked about your Liza thing.”

“My Liza thing?”

“Come on.” She leaned into her doorframe with one hand, more matronly than sultry, like someone looking down at an errant child. “You’re happy to indulge in it but you’re not happy to accept it for what it is?”

“What?”

“You’re holding my wig. You’re literally holding my wig.”

“You should take it back by the way.”

“Yeah, it suits me. I do understand you, Jason.”

He stepped forward, one foot up on the step of the threshold. “Well am I coming in?”

“It looks as though you are, but I haven’t invited you in, so.”

“So?” And he tried to place his other foot up, and she came forward slightly into his path, so that he couldn’t stand without crashing into her, leaving him in a posture like a proposal, one knee higher. “Hev, really? Really? Really we’re doing this?”

“I haven’t invited you in.”

“Well are you going to fucking invite me in?” The wig in one hand, he placed his other on the doorframe, mirroring hers.

“I don’t feel happy to right now.”

“I’ve driven all this way—I’ve driven all the way to yours and you’re not?”

“It’s not so far a drive.”

“Take this.”

He threw the black wig at her. It fell off her stomach between them onto the lip of the door, and then fell, again, like a slinky, over the threshold to the path.

Jason said, “Oh come on Hev, come on Hev. Take it.” He stooped and took the wig and tossed it between her legs into the house.

“I’m not putting it on.”

“Just put it on! Just put it on! How does it fucking harm you anyway? Really? Can you even see it, can you even feel it? Really? You can’t fucking humour me? And why not? Why not? It’s all I ask, isn’t it? Ain’t it all I ask? Come on Hev. Come on. Christ Hev. Christ. It’s just a wig and a bit of makeup. Christ alive. Women. Jesus.”

Jason took his hand off the PVC of the doorframe and rubbed his palm over the whole of his smooth head, a tantrum movement, unbecoming. He looked about himself as if to call out or entreat to others who weren’t there, as a child does at the height of his frustration. He flung his arms to his sides. Then his eyes locked into Heather’s with a cold anger and he stepped up into the doorframe and she stepped back, not meaning to, but having to, and he was in the house.

She backed out away from him because he kept moving towards her and she moved fast down the hallway to the bathroom and opened it up and locked herself inside, the wig shuffled along the lino by the sweeping arc of the door. She felt no urge to splash water on her face. She did not wish to look at herself in the mirror.

*

Wasn’t she spending her days as Liza anyway? Wasn’t she desperate for commendation, recommendation, income, all as Liza? And hadn’t it started as a silly little hobby and become full-time life? So what if she had to do it more often, to get him in the mood? What was the difference in that to being an actual star?

A relationship, if that was what they were generating between them, was sure to be like going to an office. It would have the same rhythms, the same general tediousness and moments of high drama. That was what she understood from the stories she had watched and read. To work you wore a pencil skirt, or nurse’s uniform, or dinner-lady’s tabard—was this worse? Was this not to some degree more glamorous, eccentric, magnificent?

Why was being true to yourself so highly valued? She was sure there was goodness in the supplication or indeed suppression of your own spirit. Sure that this was the origin of duty, and therefore society, and therefore civilisation—that some people did not get what they wanted, but that their not was a way for others to. She was being ridiculous. Heather, face it, be adult, be normal. So little was being demanded that she might as well accede.

How could love ever not be the perpetual presentation a false face? Heather was coming into new knowledge here, learning that to be close to someone only meant a new infinity of barriers, closer ones, true, but barriers nevertheless. Would she get anything like a softening? Perhaps by coming to know the blank facts of what another person wanted, and to begin noticing how they sought to achieve such a want. So the knowledge was humbled, while the feelings continued their pretence.

Was she ever to be satisfied? Had anyone been, of all the people who’d lived lives in all the world? Could this half-measure, this compromise, be good enough? Likewise, did she want perfection?—was there not a reduction of fear in dissatisfaction? It at least meant not having the worry of anything fully achieved becoming lost. That was the children paradox: you wanted them, and, having had them, they became the greatest liability for your soul’s general calm. So too deep perfect love. The only place it could go towards was failure, abjection, loss. Wouldn’t it be better now to have half what she wanted, a glow if not a burning, settling for less, yet with no terror of extinguishment? There were people who were doing worse, weren’t there? Not that she could presently imagine them. She wanted to be understood, and it was her fate that no one would ever understand her. Like many other billions, through all time.

All she had to do to claim a minimum of happiness was to be somebody else. She had learned that, of course, over many years and many prior disappointments. You became a new person every time anyone hurt you with true hurt. It was the simplest defence.

Better to make less of your core character, weaken yourself, alter, shift, than to go on suffering, just as a candle well-used is slowly diminished. She could allow that. Yes—she believed she would love him even if it meant her own abasement. Even if his was the life prioritised by their new joined life. She couldn’t be a mother—she was now too old—but this seemed like a similar thing, with the abnegation and the sacrifice. If you lost out at the expense of a gain, how could it be loss?

*

She looked into the mirror, finally, at last, willing to look now, and took her makeup bag from under the sink, and began to make up her face. The old Liza face, still with a little charm. A few cracks and some swelling, but hers. She supposed this was the beginning of the routine of the rest of her days.

*

Come on, Heather. Close your eyes, close your eyes merely, and pretend that the life you have is the one you always wanted.

*

*

*

Please share this story, or forward the email to a friend or family member you think might like it:

Share

I post these all for free and sharing is a real help. Thank you.

Michal. Skinhead: shaven-headed, but not naturally bald—making all the difference. He had the dark cruel formal baseline of dark stubble which marked out prominently his forehead and temples and mirrored the dark stubble on cheekbones, jawbone, which themselves spoke of extensive Mewing. Though she knew heart and soul he hadn’t needed to Mew, wasn’t a looksmaxxing success, was all original, ex ovo, a natural phenomenon, like the glorious blaze of a perfect sunset. His venous arms were tattooed and had silver rings and he wore boxy shirts showing a slight hint of tanned midriff and his jorts were baggy and his keys were attached to them. He had wired headphones.

Thank you.

i see handsome i click like, what can i say

Well thanks. Nice being appreciated.

okay be honest. when you saw id fire reacted did you stalk my photos?

Yeah, aha

well and?

Hot ngl

thats the reaction i like to incur

Incur, lol. Teaching me new words

you dont know incur?

I do now. English isn’t my first language

it seems like it is

That’s kind

im a kind kinda girl

You in London too?

yh based in stepney atm wbu

Ah cool, I’m only in Mile End

why dnt we take it offline then? i know a place that does good orange wine

I dislike orange wine intensely

me too. sounds like a date

Before replying to her again, he sent a disappearing message. She opened it. Abs, Calvin Kleins, and something fulsome.

wow

He deleted the disappeared pic.

I’m sorry. I should have asked if you’re cool with that

i am cool with that Michal

Really? I’m sorry.

well yh. i screenshotted it

You did?

yh

Sure?

*

On the day of their date, Celeste put huge thought into the carelessness of her clothes. She thought for instance that to have chipped nails would suggest she was cool, climbing-cool or doesn’t-give-a-shit-cool, so she didn’t get them done, and was anyway too overdrawn to pay her Laotian nail girl (she further hoped Michal would be getting the bill; it was a test of sorts, but also a necessity). Her Nike jacket was a men’s large, and full of moth holes. Through one of these she stuck her thumb, thinking it looked coquettish or e-girlish or whatever other impression she thought she should want to make. She wanted to look youthful.

He was already there, sat outside with his back to the plate window, silver sunglasses on. His muscular skull, his Veeted chest out under a paint-stained Carhartt shirt. His silver rings. His pleated shorts and his long white socks and his oxblood loafers and his hairless muscular tanned Slavic legs, the calf muscles each a hard sphere. He was reading a Fitzcarraldo: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, the only book any man in East London had ever heard of. He hadn’t yet ordered.

“Hey Michal,” she said, blundering in on him. He looked up fast, not startled but not calm. As he was about to stand she took the metal Tolix chair next to him—not in front of him, but by his side. He stayed sitting—she kissed his cheek.

“Nice to properly meet you Celeste,” he said with a finger in his book. He put it on the placemat, open, text down, saving his page. “Easy journey?”

“Fuck all the small talk shit. Tell me about your book.” She snuck an arm around his shoulders.

“Aha, well I’ve only just started it. It’s about Berlin.”

“A book can’t be about Berlin—what are the themes, characters, emotions, personalities? Heartbreak, agony, death, life, love?”

“I haven’t got into their characters very deeply yet.” Michal laughed. She knew he was enjoying her bluff sense of reality. Forthright, no-nonsense, merciless. Prevarication was detestable.

“Yours then. Tell me about your life and why you live here and everything about you. Like presumably you aren’t from London if England isn’t your first language, not that I’m from London—have we ordered a drink? I’ll have anything, I don’t care at all, I like all things. I’m getting the vibe of like, Poland, Albania? You have an incredible brow and jaw but you’re also tanned. Or maybe you just go on holiday a lot, like I dunno. Tell me.”

They talked, drank, flirted, touched—Celeste with most of the words and Michal with most of the allure. Her method was bombardment. His was a poise of apathy, of leaning back, of moving aside knees and hands. Because he pretended he didn’t want it, she wanted it more. They only needed the one bottle before she was saying, “Mine or yours?”, and they settled on hers, not far on foot, walking interlinked the whole way.

Fumbled drunken sex (chill, relaxing, nothing like the usual). An appropriate dick; those abs again. Michal’s trick, if he had one, was biting the ears. He bit her nipple and she squealed, though she loved it, and in return she bit his, and he looked irritated or nonplussed. Et cetera, et cetera. He slept in her arms.

In the morning he had to run to work and got up late without an alarm saying, “Oh shit Celeste, oh shit,” and throwing his clothes on and running to her door and running back to kiss her on the mouth and running back and out and closing her door gently. She giggled to herself and fell back into the deep pillows. They smelled of Michal. Boy shampoo. Something cheap—something reassuring.

Four or five minutes after he left she messaged him on Insta:

so weve been talking all this time and been on a date and I dont know what it is you do

I’m a DJ

that your day job?

I’m also in social media marketing for this fashion house

so thats your day job

That’s where I’m headed to now, yeah

thats sick. Why did you lead with DJ?

Isn’t DJ more sick?

more sick, i mean it isnt a competition

What do you do?

nothing much

At this, he didn’t reply. She guessed he was going underground, getting on the Tube. She imagined him unpacking his little Fitzcarraldo book from his roll-top rucksack and folding back the covers, reading it in one hand, his legs spread, pissing off the others sat next to him. Sweaty and rushed and on his way to work again in the same clothes as the day before.

Twenty minutes. Thirty. No reply. Forty. She texted again.

i hope youre not triggered by the fact i dont have to work

Nah

He left he convo there. She once more followed up:

i have rich family who feel guilty they got divorced and were lowkey abusive and so spend all their money on me like renting my flat and giving me an allowance. just so you dont start wondering

And—presumably off the Tube by now and into the office, making his first coffee at the machine or leaning on a colleague’s desk with his vascular forearms in their face, chitchatting about their days, perhaps chitchatting about her, Celeste, perhaps detailing her flat or the date or the wine—he didn’t reply.

At midday she sent him a tasteful nude. He opened it, but didn’t message. She left it ten minutes. Seventeen minutes. Then she said:

so youre allowed to send one but im overstepping if i do? im like too slutty for you now? its giving manosphere

No, it was really hot, I’m just with my boss

whatever

Celeste posted a Substack Note about the snowflake generation of gen-Z boys who could give but couldn’t take, who wanted to fuck you but wouldn’t reply to your nudes if it inconvenienced them. It got two likes in half an hour and she deleted it. Somehow she felt that Michal might see.

*

“Yo, you shouldn’t say retard,” Michal said.

“I thought it was back.”

“It still isn’t nice, Celeste.”

“Okay Michal, you’re the arbiter of virtue.”

“I’m really not. I’m just saying if you had a brother or a sister with Down’s or something. You could get upset.”

“In theory if this hypothetical thing happened in theory then this thing would happen.”

“Well yeah, I said if.”

“If I sucked you off in the toilets right now what would you say?”

“What?”

“Not what would you say after. What would you say to it now, as a proposition?”

“Like, during the meal?”

“Let’s just say we want five minutes to look at the desserts. You can cum in five minutes.”

“I mean. Okay. Lead on.”

*

Celeste was in bed with Michal on the hottest day of the year. All the flowers in her windowboxes had died. They looked like rows and rows of lost boners. Geranium, zinnia, impatiens. She was tracing a finger through the soft brown hair of his snail trail. It was possibly the place with the longest hair on his body. They were naked and the sheets were flu-like with spent sweat.

Michal was looking down at her, and continued what he’d been saying. “I just wanna be really really clear. Like I don’t want to lead you on. At all. I think you’re a really nice girl and obviously really hot. Our sex is great. But I’m not quite ready to be ‘dating’ again, after my ex.”

“Why were you replying to me on Insta then? Why the original thirst trap?” she said, facing away from him, her head on his chest.

“Well. Yeah, I’m sorry Celeste. I was kinda feeling the need for validation to get over feeling alone?”

“It is a bit—well, if you’re not ready. It’s suggestive. You know. People get ideas. I thought, well you asked me on a date.”

“You asked me on a date, just to be clear.”

“I don’t recognise that version of our history.”

“That’s what happened.”

“You sent me a nude.”

“And I regret that. I’ll be totally honest, I really regret that.”

“So what then?”

“So where do you want things to go?”

“To go on as they are, with a vaguely upward trajectory, perhaps towards something maybe.” At this Celeste flipped her head round so that she was looking up and right at him. The blowjob angle.

“I was sort of thinking: flatline.”

“Flatline? Like a dead person. Like someone who’s dying in a hospital.”

“I mean like a graph. Going on, but not up. Shagging. I mean, friends with benefits if that would be acceptable to you. And I fully understand if it’s not.”

“I don’t think it is.”

Michal lifted himself with his elbows, propping his back against her pillows, and at the same time dislodging her head. She sat up, crosslegged. He said, “So you want to end things?”

“No, you’re obviously misconstruing me.”

“But?”

“I want things to progress, you want things to stay as they are. Neither of us wants things to end.”

“I would rather things end than be seen to lead you on.”

““Be seen to”, really Michal?”

“For guys perception matters.”

“Oh, and it doesn’t for women, it never has, there’s never been such a thing as a woman being perceived sexually in a demeaning way, being called a slut or a whore or harlot or slag? No? Life has been perfect for women since Neolithic times when the cavemen gave us the right to vote and did not objectify us ever—”

“You know I don’t mean—”

“D’you know what, why don’t you just take yourself off home. Cos I can’t really stand to look at you just now.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

He quickly dressed, thrusting his legs into cargo shorts. He put his rings back on. He placed a cap on his head, grabbed his bag, and went to the door.

Celeste said, “So you’re just gonna go?”

“Well that is what you just suggested, yeah.”

“You’re not supposed to actually go.”

“No, but I think it might be healthy if I actually do. I’ll see you later. Take care of yourself Celeste.”

And he closed her front door.

*

hey, just wondering what you’re up to this week? ive been so busy with my flat move and everything. would be nice to catch up xx

Hours later, Michal messaged:

Hope it went well!

yh, did thanks, though one of the removal guys was an absolute prick. everything is fucking damaged lmao im fuming. ill tell you about it in person. pints at the saracen’s head?

*

He was drifting from her. The texts were growing lifeless. It was terrifying. She decided to increase her intensity in order to counteract the loss of his.

sooo, im going to this gig tonight in peckham if you wanted to come? i have a spare ticket cos my mate dropped out

Ah, sorry I’ve actually got something on. Enjoy though.

Perhaps it wasn’t clicking for him because of something to do with her body. Celeste meant to remedy it. She was up at five thirty the following morning, straight to the gym then straight to the treadmills and from then straight to the hip thruster, the glute kickback machine—she thought it was yes because she was a skinny white girl and he’d been seen to like the Insta pics of tanned, Latinx, curvaceous, BBL women, women, not girls, therein the point, there the whole point—she was too slight fey impish and cutesy and he wanted someone rawer, domme, with a bit of chaos in her, a bit of wilderness in the soul or untamed bucking energy. Yes, to be buckaroo’d in bed, she would like his liking that, yes. Whenever she did spin classes to work off the final 5% of tummy fat she was pleased because she was able to text Michal at the same time as riding.

*

“Please send it to him.”

“Isn’t it time to cut your losses and move on, Celeste? Like if Michal’s blocked you, isn’t that a pretty clear indication that you’re not what he’s into?”

“Well it certainly wasn’t the case when we were fucking that he wasn’t into me.”

“I know, but I mean personality. Character. And anyway he’s a boy and his mind might have changed.”

“If you’d just send it for me, then I’d know for sure, then I can be done with him and wash my hands if he doesn’t reply and it’ll be over? Just to check. Maybe he’s done it by accident or on a whim.”

“Yeah. I’ll do it for you, as a friend. But he isn’t going to reply.”

*

Well she knew where the fashion house was—one of the grand tree-shaded squares London revelled in, dusty and full of leaves the shape of splayed fingers. Fortunately she clocked that opposite his work there was a café, with awnings and parasols and al fresco dining. She could blend in too because there were dozens of likeminded girlies with likeminded laptops and iced coffees—this was decidedly not a place of matcha, she saw—and tote bags of various defunct literary magazines who wore their activewear to Zoom calls and their ponytails through backwards caps. So she set up base camp. It was only six quid for an iced coffee and she could drink them as slowly as once an hour and all the while stay staring at the revolving doors of his office and wait to see if he could be intercepted.

Michal came out around 1 p.m. —she’d been there hours—with a group of other men who were attractive but not as attractive as Michal. He was taller and stronger and had a carefree bearing to his step which suggested he’d played sports when younger, but Celeste knew he hadn’t, she knew it was just one other part of the natural aristocracy of his body. She got up and rushed over to him, leaving her laptop and coffee and bag.

“Michal! Michal!”

She heard him say to his colleagues, “Oh shit that’s this girl I was seeing.”

Celeste jogged the last steps, putting her hands on her knees performatively, as if out of breath. She wasn’t. She was assured and fresh. “Hey Michal, I just spotted you from over there.” Her arm was waving approximately at the café.

“Hey Celeste. Look, guys I’ll catch up with you. See you in a sec, yeah?” He turned her with his turning, facing them both to the other direction and beginning to walk. “Celeste? What are the chances?”

“I was just about to say the same thing. I was just over there.”

“Yeah, you said. How’ve you been?”

“How’ve you been! I haven’t heard from you in ages.”

“Ah yeah. I’m sorry. I’ve been so fucking busy. I wasn’t trying to be incommunicative. Is that the word?”

“Ghosting, you could say.”

“No Celeste, I wouldn’t do that to you, not to anyone.”

“Well, you kinda did!” she laughed.

“I just needed some space, needed to figure some shit out.”

“Have you figured the shit out?”

“Look, let’s not, please.”

“Okay. So about the dates I asked you on and you never replied?”

“About them. Yeah. Look, I want to be good to you. I was pretty much a coward. Look. It’s like this.”

“Is it now?”

“Celeste. I think we shouldn’t see each other again. I don’t think we’re right, and I’m certainly not in the right head space. And you, I’m not sure. We’re quite manic, both of us, in our own ways. I don’t think it’s gonna add up to anything good.”

“That’s so funny actually, because I think exactly the opposite.”

“I know you do, and look.” He stopped walking, swivelled, grabbed her shoulders softly. “Look, if we’re disagreeing on this then there is no way forward. Because whatever dating is or whatever is to become a relationship has to be mutual. And it’s horrible to say it out loud, but it isn’t quite mutual. I don’t believe we think of each other in the same way.” He took one hand off her and rubbed his eye again and again. “I just—look, it just isn’t going to happen. I’m sorry.”

She was calm, steely, dry. “But I want it to happen.”

“I think I’ve been quite clear, haven’t I?”

“Yes. But I disagree.”

“You can’t disagree I’m afraid.” He took the other hand away, and began to walk, not with her.

“Michal, Michal, come here, come back. We need to talk—you can’t walk off from me, you can’t leave me, you can’t, you can’t do this, what right do you have—?”

His back was growing ever smaller as he paced the square in the direction of his colleagues.

“No, no,” she said, running after him. “No Michal, no.”

“Yes Celeste. Be good to yourself. This is goodbye.”

“No it isn’t. It can’t be.”

*

And because she couldn’t bear not to have someone meant she had to be alone? Celeste deleted everything from her phone, all apps, all memories. She thought of herself as derailing into a period of passionate loneliness—she, the extrovert.

On the website of the fashion house there was an About Us page; on this she found Michal Holoubek, dressed fashionably but formally in a wide-lapelled jacket. She saved the image to her desktop. She then printed the image. She had it on A4 paper and held it to herself in bed awhile, crying, and, eventually, sleeping.

*

A week and one day later, the penultimate day of July, early morning, Celeste set out from home and went to the front door of the building in which Michal rented a flat with friends, and she waited outside the door from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. to 8.45 a.m., at which time Michal opened the door.

“Celeste?”

“Michal. I just want a quick word.”

“Please—this isn’t right. You’re at my home now. Please do not stalk me.”

He didn’t stop walking.

“No, please, one moment of your time, just one moment’s all I ask.”

“No,” he shouted at her. “No.”

That was the conclusion. His back receded into the distance for the last time.

*

please michal if we could only talk. i totally overstepped so many boundaries and i know that and i want to learn from it. if i could see you it would be really helpful for my growth, even if only for five minutes. even only one minute literally. im new to this and you know all the stuff about your ex and how you didnt want anything serious got to me, because meanwhile heres me thinking this could be it, could he perhaps be The One or some shit because i loved you so much, and still do……… and ppl talk about closure and its always sounded like bullshit but now i finally do understand how much i really need closure…. like i cant bear the thought that it has just ended and im never to see you again, you know? and part of me knows youre not even going to reply to this text so this is a failed attempt at getting closure and i wish it could be more cathartic for me than it will be. just please let me try one more time to be a good person

*

What was there left to her to do?—after she had tried pills, once, half-heartedly? After she had cut her forearm with a Stanley knife left by the movers, less half-heartedly, and sent the photo to him via the one app she wasn’t blocked on, and he hadn’t opened it. How was she supposed to live with this hot pounding agony in head and heart at all hours, telling her things she did not wish to hear, telling her what to do, how to solve it, how it would never be solved, how she was worthless without him?

*

She didn’t have much, but there was the screenshot. She had that as evidence, as backup.

*

She emailed his work, desperate for him, saying it was rape.

*

*

*

Please share this story if you liked it.

You might want to warn people that it is dark.

For an extremely reasonable £12.99 you can pre-order my debut novel here, worldwide, with variable shipping costs:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-long-let/ben-sims/9781919184760

I will let the book shop’s page speak for itself. I also think the cover speaks for itself. This is an inadvisable birthday/Christmas gift:

please forward this email to everyone you’ve ever met & don’t forget to restack

Share

Now he recalled passing the tarmac hotbox—bright yellow, slapped with warning signs—still holding Mum’s hand. It was Highway Maintenance doing a repair to the brick pavers in the laziest way imaginable: filling a gap in the neat herringbone zip of brick on brick with pooling black asphalt. Heat haze above the hot tarmac seemed otherworldly, perhaps damaged in his memory. It was like water within the air.

Liam ran away from his mum. He remembered: some boys playing one-touch against a car park wall skied it, and he ran from her grip to stop the football. Already it was reflexive. Couldn’t be helped. A terrier after small prey. A footballer after a miskick.

At which point—according to the coroner’s inquest—one of the propane canisters feeding the tarmac hotbox suffered a Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion (BLEVE) after prolonged exposure to proximate open flames heating the griddle of a street food burger stall. They’d parked up far too near. The liquefied propane became gas instantaneously and ruptured the steel canister as easily as an overfilled balloon bursts. In turn—according to the coroner’s inquest—the resultant fireball (between one thousand and two thousand degrees Celsius) sent forth was the size of a detached house, consuming entirely the burger stall and two adjacent stalls, knocking three vendors to the ground and shredding their clothing and leaving them with fourth-degree burns, though alive.

Meantime the shockwave and fireball hurled the tarmac hotbox several yards and fractured its metal and ceramic shell just in front of Liam’s mum—Debbie—spraying out its heated asphalt “like a fountain or oil blowout”. That’s what the inquest said. He imagined it like dark lava, covering her.

Liam missed the explosion. He felt the incredible bonfire heat, like a new sun brought out behind him at ground level, and heard the loud seething volcano-moan of the blast. But he did turn to see Mum staggering like a woman in a black veil, tar over her, her face gone, her arms and shoulders and body covered, dripping with the molten stuff, which pulled out in long stretches like black mozzarella dangling from a mouth to the surface of a pizza. Her face was submerged in the thick asphalt and if she was screaming you could not see or hear it. (He would never remember what the last words she had spoken to him’d been, but he hoped beyond hope that, as he ran for the football, she’d called: “Liam.”)

She stepped once or twice with her arms out blind in front of her. Then the leg muscles seemed to give up—according to the coroner’s inquest, they had literally burned away—and she fell. She fell and did not move again. He was there, seven, looking. Though flame and destruction were everywhere, the trees all alight with embers and the market now a shell-crater, Liam remembered that he’d felt very cold. He’d not since felt that feeling again, except in dreams, most nights.

*

What he had done, years later, was obsessively google “asphalt” and “tarmac” and “bitumen” and “Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion” and “propane canister” without accepting why. He googled “2007 Bletchley Queensway Explosion”, and memorised its Wikipedia as you would poetry.

By then, Dad’d been jailed. Because his parents couldn’t, it was Liam’s granddad who was to raise him. That meant Wolverton, an hour’s cycle to school, and the scrubland remnants of class pride, once pageantry, ales, and fetes—now garden gnomes, Nike, and iPad selfies. But it was a move from flat to terraced house, a real one: brick: Victorian; and with everything else gone that at least felt like solidity. Cow parsley, bluebells, brambles, dandelions. Lots of this stuff, growing near the rubberised fencing of the astro’, where you took throw-ins and corners. Plants Granddad would teach him.

Granddad—Liam did not once call him, except on a hospital visit together, at the reception desk, Michael—knew flowers. He knew many things, having chosen the lighter sort of life, teaching guitar at the local secondary modern, but above all he cared for plants in their curated and wilder forms. He knew how to grow irises and orchids in his greenhouse, and rhubarb and apple trees and cabbages in the garden, and he knew how to pollard and espalier and pleach, testament to seventy years loving poetry. The poetry had come first, revealing to him the worth of all flora. “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet” was his motto. As such Liam would meet his first girlfriend at his granddad’s allotment.

This was also when Liam started his habit of reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a numbing method: cram the mind so full that little else could enter. He went through dictionaries front to back and whole walls of encyclopaediae. His thoughts ran rarefied yet with little work to be put to, demanding challenge without object. This soothed things. His other method, starting later, aged thirteen, was weightlifting.

First, PureGym, to which he cycled six days a week, using a twenty-four hour membership and insomnia to the utmost. Noob gains were visible after four months of a routine of fastidious eccentricity. He looked back to it and cringed. He’d done everything: machines, compounds, cables, pull ups, chin ups, sit ups, planks, handstands, kettlebells, medicine balls, standing jumps, HIIT, rowing, running, yoga. Much of it from midnight to two a.m., and much of it alone. A PureGym so late and so empty you could take shirtless progress pics without anybody to care.

Lifting was a totalised form of focus, because it took in mental efforts (calorie counting, workout plans, physiology (brachioradialis, iliac furrows, psoas), biochemistry) and was physically something than which you could do nothing harder. The purpose, as he came to see it, was to aim for, at all times, one rung down from the impossible—and he took it as his allegory for life. However, it was obvious: you got larger, stronger, more attractive, whereas the increments of other sorts of self-improvement were vaguer fare, defined by another ten French verbs learned and two forgotten. Were you forgetting, and were you forgetting you’d forgotten? With lifting, at least, you didn’t need to think about thinking.

Liam also uploaded his first YouTube video in his early teens. It surprised him, being a simple bodyweight ab routine, by topping out in a few weeks at 1,900 views. Carl, his mate, said “That’ll all be paedos then.” But he filmed his second (pull ups vs. chin ups) and it reached 2,500. There were, he contended, probably not two-and-a-half thousand paedophiles interested in pull ups. Carl, on the swing next to him, in the park, during a peachfuzz dusk, scoffed—yet was impressed.

By sixteen then he’d firmed on it: college first, but no uni, and at eighteen he’d set himself up as a personal trainer. PTs were paid well and pulled. It was a few years after the summer Zyzz had died; a few years after the Olympics were in London; athletes had been everywhere—and what else did you expect of someone born with a little too much testosterone and an education in words and plants cobbled off a grandparent? “Not the uni type” said the Deputy Head. Well: this cat is not a dog. You might yourself be the uni type but could you fucking manage a two-plate bench?

*

He went with Granddad to the allotment often, wheeling the wheelbarrow (“Look at those feckin’ arms on yer”) with young efficiency. Granddad was of the age when his own arms were most notable for blue veins, and second for bones, third for skin, tagged and liverish, and fourth, finally, for musculature.

One day there were two women bending over weeds. Liam neared their rival allotment, begloved, holding secateurs. The first was young, his age, with Amy Winehouse looks, and already tattooed. She held a shovel in one hand. The second was old. She had short, choppy hair. Her eyes were just dark dots in a face of falling wrinkle. Two caves set behind waterfall.

Liam was literally measuring the circumference of his biceps every week now, as well as his chest and thighs and sometimes forearms. He wasn’t yet stacked but neither did he any longer resemble his Bieber-haired mates at school. And, measuring himself, he knew himself—and so knew how others knew him. The younger woman stared.

Granddad said, “Alright ladies, what’ve you got growing then?”

The older woman unstooped herself, and spoke. “You ain’t gonna ask us our names?”

“Well. What’s yer names?”

“I’m Bridg. This is Emma.”

“Emma. Bridget. How do you do. I’m Michael. This is my grandson Liam. He lives with me.”

“Good to meet yous,” Liam said, and saw how they looked at him. Emma, in particular, was unabashed to let her eyes stick. Her look caught him shiningly in the sunlight and her eyes glinted like clean hubcaps; her skin was pale.

“And as for what we’re growing, I’ll be fucked if I know.”

Granddad laughed like a dog. It shot out of him, as it rarely did. He had a gaze for Bridget like Emma’s gaze. His jaw was open, and he had spittle at his lips, and he had the bitter castellation of a broken old grin. Liam had told him smoking was no good, and here was evidence: the yellow sclerae with stressed capillaries.

Granddad said, “We can give you a hand.”

Liam wasn’t that keen to do double allotment work—mostly he came to keep his granddad company. Emma saw this in him, and helped him to resist Granddad’s decrepit gallantry by coming over to him first—itself an act of gallantry, he figured.

“I think my nan’s chirpsing your granddad,” she said

He laughed. “What the hell?” But he recognised the obvious hound manner.

“You can speak for him but I know her when she gets like that. Look in her eyes. She looks upwards, and hardly ever at you. She tries to get beneath you if you’re taller so she can look up at you. She literally thinks it makes her look like she’s some peng ting who’s still at school. She’s sixty-nine.”

“Ha.”

“Don’t “ha” sixty-nine, wasteman.” Emma spoke like she wanted to be a black girl. She was black’s opposite: blotched, freckled, reddenable, translucent. She had green in her neck where the arteries could be seen. Her hair was dyed a darker red than its usual red, and revealed itself at the roots. He’d never seen drier, more worked-over hair. Yet she was attractive.

“Never seen you two here before,” he said.

“Well I’ve never come here before. You’d’ve seen Nan but I ain’t never come with her, cos that is my policy. And I guess you’d notice me not her so you wouldn’t of known if she was here.”

“Maybe, maybe.” Everything she said to him brought out this unknown, tentative—nervous?—giggle. He’d never laughed that way.

“And you don’t go school in Wolvie.”

“No? Don’t I?”

“No, you do not.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t. I moved. I don’t have parents. So I moved here with me Granddad. I’m from Bletchley.”

“Bletchley’s butters.”

“Lol. Ha ha.”

“I didn’t mean that—I didn’t meant to be rude about where you’s from.”

“You wasn’t. Weren’t.”

“Sorry.”

“Hey mate, don’t worry about it.”

“It’s shit here anyway. Have you been here long? It’s fucking boring.”

“Not too long nah.”

“I wanna get out. I’m either moving up City or else to London. That’s my plan.”

“London yeah?”

“I thought I’d be a nail technician and open my own place and you can get way more money in London. Nail technician to the stars, innit.”

“Aha. You’ve thought it all out.”

“And you? What’s your plan then?”

“I dunno. But—well, I do. I wanna be a PT. Be my own boss yeah.”

“You already look like one.”

“Yeah? Aha. How’s this?”

Somehow he had the passion of courage come to him and next he was raising both arms parallel to the earth, his elbows bent, flexing his biceps for her. As he knew from several thousand glances in the mirror and several hundred mirror selfies, to bring up the biceps emphasised your v-taper and made your t-shirt ride up, as it was now, revealing the snail-trail of adolescent brown hair he so prized for being six months ahead of his friends’.

Emma stuck her shovel into the ground and leant forward onto it, raising one foot to the step, and crossed her arms. She looked at Liam, looked away, looked back, with a sort of chewing-on-a-grass-stalk glare. Unimpressed, it seemed, or willing to be thought to look unimpressed. He thought she was ridiculous. Cat-eye makeup and dyed hair and tattoos, but leaning cross-armed on a shovel, like the old memes of the Mona Lisa in rave glasses. He put his arms down.

*

Given her character as he’d so far seen it, Liam didn’t expect Em to be a cleanfreak. Proud was how she preferred to be termed, whenever he was ribbing her. Above all else at home, she desired the colour white. Not grey, as was becoming fashionable—unrelenting white. Kitchen cupboards and bathroom ceramic. Walls, ceiling, tiled floors. Sofa, armchair, dining chairs, desk. Em forced her Nan to whiten everything. She’d taken Liam home once day and offered him a Coke—it’d fizzed up on opening, bubbling past his fingers, and dropped two splats on the tiles. “Now I’ve got to mop, godsake Liam.” But she didn’t have to mop—you’d’ve just wiped it up, wet sponge or wet wipe or towel, and it would’ve come right off the tiles. But no: Em mopped the whole room. She called him a fucking melt.

She was the girl who taught him how to finger someone. She taught him, tentatively, how to have sex, how to be gentle, explained all the parts of herself. She taught him—they were still sixteen—how to be a man, and be kind, and noble, even, when your girlfriend needed to have an abortion—how to turn up, be there, hold her hand, speak nothing critical, take her for ice cream, bring her ibuprofen, cuddle her as she cried through the night, and so on, and so on.

Why was her cleanliness so notable? Because of her personality, maybe: all slapdash, dirty jokes, last-minute rush. Em’s laugh like a 1970s comedian. Her punching way of joshing you, lowblows to the kidney or triceps, leaving you with a dead arm, punches just too hard for play. These were not attributes of a girl (who modelled herself on a dead alcoholic) for whom clean surfaces were obsessional. But they were. She had some need to erase, perhaps because her personality was so large. It didn’t want to compete—like how Granddad said pictures were best on white walls, for the sake of the contrast. Well, Liam didn’t know about that, but he’d been to the National Gallery—school trip—and’d liked the Renaissance paintings in gnarled gold frames on the walls of red and green silk, which were like London summed up.

So then their first real row was a cleanliness row. Liam was round Em’s, her parents were out, and they were having ciders and getting a takeaway. Big Brother was on. At the kitchen island they divvied up the curries (onion bhajis; prawn puri; lamb jalfrezi; butter chicken; two garlic naans) from their tupperware, filling plastic plates high, and placed them on trays. They carried them into the lounge to sit in front of the TV, balancing the trays on their knees. The sofa was white. They had cutlery on their trays and their tins of Strongbow. A contestant was sat on another’s back, riding them like a horse. The contestant said she had always wanted to be a jockey; her physique had not made it possible. The butter chicken was brick-orange and the jalfrezi waterlogged—it had dryish pieces of something Liam didn’t know, of the ilk of lemongrass. The sofa was white. Liam’d finished his cider and was reaching over to Em’s to troll her, as if he were going to drink her drink, but she batted his hand proprietorially and he hadn’t expected it and he leaned back surprised and quickly forward again to right himself and his tray toppled and the momentum of the plate’s ceramic sent it sliding downwards to the front edge of the tray, hitting the edge and upsetting it, flipping it entirely off him with the motion of a flipped coin, and his reaction was to stand up and into the curries, knocking the naan away with his thigh, cutlery flying, his empty tinnie ricocheting off into the distance, and the bright oils and oranges and browns making their peace with his trackies, with the light carpet, and with the segment of white sofa that had been between his legs.

Em’s response was to say, with angered wisdom, “Oh my fucking god you can’t get curry out of anything,” in the unconscious, gnomic speech patterns of words said under great stress. She had to take her own tray, fastidiously, and place it on the coffee table, safe; she then lifted Liam’s plate, just as you’d lift a rock and send those creatures which favour dark and mosses scuttling off from the new ultraviolet world, only finding beneath indelible curry on absorbent carpet. He’d already lifted his tray, holding it uselessly. She was already saying, Liam, Liam, fucksake, fucksake Liam, Liam I can’t fucking, Liam.

Together now they were moving and scraping and scrubbing—a pink bottle of Vanish sprayed ineffectually into jalfrezi—and Em’s shouts grew hotter. Liam wasn’t taking it. He was embarrassed to have done this, while a guest, and the masculinity in him demanded that there be reasons other than his own failing, so he hit back: “Well if you hadn’t’ve of hit me and made me jump it wouldn’t’ve happened.”

“Wouldn’t of happened, so, so now this is my fucking fault? Look at this place.”

“Well I wouldn’t have reacted so, so I wouldn’t’ve leant forward and the plate went sliding, because it put the weight on the edge of the tray.”

“I’m actually not fucking interested in the method that made this happen cos what’s happened’s happened and we’ve got to clean it up, and what’s Nan gonna say?”

“We’ll clean it but I couldn’t not do it, I couldn’t do anything else.”

She looked up from her two-handed grip on a sponge, where she’d been lathering the carpet, raking it, “You couldn’t of done nothing else? Like maybe actually not standing up and sending curry flying onto the fucking carpet? And we’ll have to get a new sofa an’ all?”

“Maybe if you’re so fucking worried about mess you shouldn’t’ve had us eating curries on a white sofa with trays on our laps to begin with?”

Fury in her now—a quivering at the temples, as when the jawbone moves. “Liam are you fucking—you’re literally taking this and placing the blame on me rather than admitting you’ve fucked up? And how is this not any different from your usual? The way you love to be above things—the way it’s me what’s always at fault and you’re just observing, cos you’ve never done anything wrong, you can never admit you’ve made mistakes, you’ve fucked up, and look at this shit. In fact, you know what, you know what Liam, can you just fuck off? Like, literally head home? And I’ll just deal with this because I can’t have you here right now. Just fuck the fuck home. I’ll see you another time.”

This was his first experience of love—he termed it that, mentally, without saying it to her, too worried he was using a big word wrong, and maybe as worried that she’d use it back—and, being his first experience of love, the argument terrified him. The welter of so many emotions, good and bad, like mixed colours and whites in the washing machine, was always going to be too much, what with his preoccupations. He wasn’t a stand-up-and-take-it sort of guy. She should’ve known him for what he was—the 10k run at midnight sort, where feelings could be put into physicality, his calculus being that a burn in the throat and lungs was fine distraction from the subtler pains. He wasn’t an arguer; and so, two ciders in him, he cycled home, reflected somewhat, then cycled to PureGym, doing deadlifts in the bleak hours when only the sorry and forgotten made use of 24/7 gyms.

*

One summer evening the following year, while Liam was filming a fitness video in the garden, his granddad came home early from the pub. He was there in the background, hands on hips, inhaling the air, strident on the smashed patio, evidently pissed. Liam only noticed him after a set of parallel bar dips, narrating for the camera.

Sunset was near—he let himself be irate. “Granddad, mate, you’ve just got in the back of the shot. Fucksake. I’m gonna have to film that again and those dips killed me.” Liam wiped chalky hands on his shorts; he was shirtless, knowing that it improved his views. He didn’t yet have the full spread of a man’s chest hair, though it was coming in, one pec faster than the other. Granddad’s own was like the spread of a white mould.

“Why can’t you get a real job then. There’s apprenticeships going all over town.” He was wearing ridiculous aviators, but his glare could be felt behind them.

“This is a real job. And at eighteen I can be a full-time PT. You don’t really get it. I’m getting two hundred quid a month from YouTube.”

“Less than my pension.”

“And?”

“Yer of working age, son. You should be getting more than a feller who’s retired.”

“I’m seventeen.”

“You should learn to drive.”

“I’m planning to. It’s expensive now. Not like in your day, Granddad.”

“There’s always an excuse.”

“This excuse is also the truth, just saying.”

One of Michael’s fingers went up behind his sunglasses to rub his eye, performing a motion in lieu of talk. This was the best you’d get in Wolverton. You could stump someone and they didn’t even need to reply—it was implicit that they believed they were correct, and there was no changing what people believed. Proof, argument, conversation: these were all too abstract in a town of people who were sick of abstractions. They cared about petrol prices and the cost of heating your home. The only success around here was success itself. A newer car. A kitchen extension.

*

They had a Halloween party for schoolfriends that autumn. Granddad said it’d be all right, just tidy the place up when done—Liam knew if Em came it would be more acceptable for him to lobby for Bridget to be there too. That’s why he wanted the party to happen. Funny how the tastes age. You fancied sixteen-year-olds at sixteen. At seventy you were into seventy. One of the boons of growing up. She was invited, and said she’d come. Em had bigged it up, he guessed, needing her Nan’s backup.

The mood was shots, mostly. Jäger, sambuca, tequila rose, apple sours, vodka, vodka, vodka. Granddad, a man who hadn’t fought at the Falklands but who had the attitude of a man who’d fought at the Falklands, was even seen with a WKD. Various faces of lupine young beauty or scrofula everywhere—zits, taped piercings, neon V-necks, the scrawn of youth, and its compensating doughy softness, of fluff-beards and fuzzy arms. Some costumes serious, some slutty—Catwomen, Batmen, skeletons and axe-wielders and zombie nurses. Bridg alone, Bridg the dinner lady, was the only female being Liam thought, push come to shove, he wouldn’t shag. And there was, of course, Em, looking dark and undead, having made herself up as Corpse Bride in jeans; and, as well as dark and undead, dark and gorgeous, dark and fit as fuck, dark and something to do with Shakespeare’s sonnets they’d been doing in their English lessons. Liam himself was Leonidas, from 300: abs out, and he’d even had the fake tan, something he’d been keen on but needed an excuse for.

“Nah, didn’t Em tell you I’m not doing college?” he said to Bridg. “I’m going on with my YouTube, which I can live on. And when I’m eighteen—just as soon as I’m eighteen—you want a shot by the way?—no? alright cool—at eighteen, two months from now, it will be possible for me to become a PT, it’s just not allowed now, not this age, they don’t let you. You must be thinking about retiring right around now, no?”

Later, he saw his granddad leaning over Bridget like a lamppost over a street. He was sending his massive bastard’s smile down over her, and she took it from him, as if he were the Marbella sun, and she ready to burn. Wherever her hands moved, Granddad’s hands moved to intercept them, half holding, half pawing. They were discussing some absolute bollocks regarding a pub which had become a Pilates studio. “This means they’ve won, you know,” he heard Granddad say. Bridget was a foolish something-or-other fifty years too late, and divorced, and alone, smiling gooeyly up into his smoker’s dentistry as though he offered all the world.

Out in the garden, someone hit someone. Dan had fallen into Jason, knocking his rollie to the damp patio tiles. Liam saw it through the French doors which Granddad insisted on closing whenever anyone smoked, though he himself smoked inside. (“My baccy’s superior.”) Jason’s sole punch landed, a hook to jaw and cheekbone, and Dan, pissed, fell into the garden fence and espaliered jasmine. But the stringy perfumed ropes of plant held him, unbroken, and even the fence took the weight. Clearly he considered the punch fair, because he got up, holding his face manfully, and rotating his jawbone as if to test it still worked. Bridg came out and nan’d them both, offering cups of tea and insisting they shake hands. It was just one of a thousand teenage incidents that night, from getting off, to posing for Snapchats, and, being just one, failed even to be a highlight—was mosaic only, a tile in the picture of youth, building up to something, but nothing in itself.

Then Em. She called Liam over and said he should help hold back her hair. “I’m gonna bob for apples.” They did have a big nautical bucket, banana-yellow, filled with cold water and seven or eight apples, though nobody had yet bothered. Was this meant to show some prowess? That she could, because she hadn’t required braces? Did she want the front of her black blouse wetted by the water? Did she just want to be touched?—her hairspray suggested the latter, because there was no way anything on that head was moving, even without his calloused hands at her neck.

“Get that one,” he said.

“I’m tryna get that one, stop.”

“Go on. Go for it. Oorah, marine, let’s fucking go.”

“Just don’t let go of my hair.”

“You’ve got it.”

Em had the apple at the end of her teeth. “I ggod id. I did id, ‘iam.”

She came up rearing, incisors hooked into appleskin. She’d gotten the only green one, and was holding it now like the centrepiece pig of a medieval banquet. Not that she was piglike—far from it, far daintier, far more a little vole or stoat or otter or other such sweet scarpering river mammal. Liam said, “oink oink,” and she let go of the apple (it hit the water, making a pompous splash), laughing at him—he folded back the tip of his nose to expose his nostrils, oinking at her. He grabbed her now, twohanded, and she squealed, and he kissed the inside of her ear and flitted his tongue in the whorl. Em giggled and moaned.

Next with a bottle of vodka in hand they were headed upstairs to his room, now impeccable, all things boxed or tidied or generally vacuumed, equally Em’s influence and YouTube’s. The red light of his filming set-up winked steadily in the otherwise dark. She was kissing him the most hotly and impassioned she ever had, and they toppled to the bed, he between her. One palm under her head, he reached to clutch her breast with the other, then hips, then down, where the plasticky netting of her costume’s skirt’s innards barely concealed her own. His finger reached there, followed soon by his face, followed soon by a readjustment to standing, as he pressed into her.

He whispered, “Wait—” and paused.

“I’m on the pill now Liam. Don’t worry.”

Well, he was glad he’d worked on his hip flexors, or it would’ve been desultory stuff. The heating was on full and the curtains were drawn and a thin glow of emanation of streetlight bordered the window. Sweating, the both of them, Em’s makeup came off clumpy and he could feel the slime of his fake tan melting.

“Don’t get anything on my clothes.”

“I’m not. God fuck yes Emma.”

She came, and it made him cum. He collapsed over her, heart beating by heart in the night. They lay in their warm mess, till she squirmed, not happy at his still being in her, nor the fact of the new, cold-growing filth, as it seemed to seem to her.

“Mate. Mate did you just cum in me again? Did you not pull out? Are you fucking joking?”

“I—Em, fuck, you said you were on the pill—I was so into it—”

“I am on the pill. I’m taking the piss.” She paused, becoming rigid under him. “You know, for a really muscular guy sometimes you don’t know how to fuck hard.”

“That’s horrible Em. Don’t say that to me, c’mon.”

“Sometimes I don’t know why you put all that effort into your body for that.”

“You’re wasted. You’re just pissed.”

“I’m honest.”

*

Smart cookies, trapped socio-geographically with those who aren’t, have a tendency to fleeing. Two things came at once: Liam, aged eighteen, decided to leave Em and move to London, and told her so. This was when he’d planned everything, and gotten a studio flat sorted in Camden (why Camden? he’d think later) and booked the moving van—he could drive now—and packed up his garden gym and all his weights and was about to leave. He needed the out in order to face her, the sense of being ready. Like those with dangerous lives who keep a prepared bag by the front door.

This was the first thing; but on the same day, after he’d broken up with her, and she’d hugged and cried and argued and pleaded, through the whole afternoon, a three-hour breakup, he cycled back home and found Granddad dead in an armchair.

A stroke, he was informed. Instantaneous, or thereabouts. Granddad had the Collins guide to garden birds slumped open in his lap, and by him was a dead cigarette which he’d seemed to’ve had the foresight and will, even in the act of his dying, to stub in his Admiral Nelson ashtray, saving the house from housefire.

*

Liam’s dad inherited the house, but Liam had to deal with the sale while he was in prison. He learned after months of helping that you can’t really trust an addict. He offered Liam nothing. He kept it all. But it turned out there were bookies’ debts, and the estate was reduced to nothing worth fighting for.

*

Bridget held the wake at her place. She kept the curtains drawn and blinds down, not fully paying heed to tradition, nor to her impulse of superstitiousness. Liam brought in aspidistra and pothos and philodendron. Michael Cromwell would not have wanted flowers. He was, foremost, a plant man. His son, Liam’s father, was denied licence to attend the funeral.

An Irish relative, a cousin of a cousin, Sláinte’d Liam with a clink of pint glass. He’d forgotten the cousin’s name already, knowing him by the sunburnt quality of his skin—not actually sunburnt, just sunburn-coloured. His little blue eyes were like blue abattoir stamps on the flesh of a pig. He’d lived in England longer than Liam’d been alive. He said:

“Yer Granda was a good man. Very diligent. A very careful man.”

“Thank you.”

“But he was a bit careless dying and leaving you all on yer own, no?”

“I don’t think he planned on dying.”

“Awh look I wasn’t meaning that. But you’ve had all the house to deal with I hear.”

“I don’t mind, honestly.”

“Affairs in order. That’s what they say. Well—all my affairs is in order. I keep ’em from the wife.”

“Charming.”

“Eh, lighten up lad. Look on your face like you’ve been to a funeral. I’m joking.”

*

A few days after Granddad’s funeral, and wake, when he’d already broken up with Em, and had his flat ready in Camden, Liam was out for a jog and ran into Bridg (dual-wielding carrier bags in which he could see Lambrini and chocolate digestives) who was stomping along the canal path. (Why the canal path, with her food shop?) She’d been good to him at the wake, so he was happy to take out his iPod headphones and give her a bit of talk.

Eventually, post-chitchat, she got to: “Look, what I said to you the other day Liam, I meant it.”

What had she said? Something about twelve or fourteen pints was making it hard to remember. But whatever heartfelt musings she’d mused, it’d be awkward to’ve forgotten. So he had to play with it. “You did? It meant a lot.”

“Of course. You’ve been like family, and Michael was like family.”

“Well, thank you.”

“So, do you want to take us up on it?”

He tried to be acrobatic. “How would it work?”

“How’d it work? You’d just move in, that’s all. The room’s all prepared. And I know with Emma things’re hard, but that’s no reason to not.”

Vaguenesses returned. Yes, to move in with her, after he’d had the house sold for Dad. Was it right to counter such generosity?—such as is expressed most deeply in the unthinking kindness of older women. Yet London was there, and anyway, he couldn’t, not with Em, could he?—live with her, after breaking up with her? You had to have some sense of honour, even nowadays.

She went on, “We know the house is sold and all that, and you’re like, you were like family, as I say.”

“It’s really so lovely of you to ask, Bridg. But—”

“No, don’t say “but”, there ain’t no need for that.”

“It’s just that I have a contract with a flat in London. And, I think, ultimately, it’d be fairer on Em to go. You wouldn’t want you heart broken and to be reminded of it every day.”

“Oh, she can get over that in no time at all, I know her, she bounces back.”

“I think I’ve got to go to London. But thank you, Bridg.”

*

Having moved in (a form of labour very different to weightlifting, involving all the accessory muscles you never worked, straining the ligaments, heating the blood) and with no friends and no plans, Liam visited his new local, The World’s End, sank nine lagers, took a girl home—or, was taken home by a girl—and woke up, drymouthed and migrainey, at approximately four a.m., alone. He’d ushered himself into London with two types of vice, and his lumbar burned where he’d been moving boxes of weights. In the moment he felt awful—but it seemed like the right welcome.

Liam did, at last, three weeks later, after two failed interviews, find a job as a PT, though not as he’d hoped. Posher than PureGym, but a lengthy commute. Not a powerlifting clientele—mostly the yoga sort, those for whom gym was not regime but routine; and therefore, he felt, pointless. He was going north every day, out of London, to the pretentious wastes of the green belt, where 1990s petrol stations met new football training grounds, isotonic therapy centres, cryo, the nation’s best state schools, and endless shit landscape. There were trees here, and birds, and everything Granddad had loved in familiar forms, but, encircled by the M25, they seemed of circus or zoo more than wilderness. Range Rovers and Bentleys. Men with filler; women who’d had it dissolved.

He got his cyan uniform and started at Camelot Fitness the day after he interviewed. Most of his work was to be classes in Studio Two (Studio One was for spin, and therefore prioritised), a mixed space of racks and cardio. He replaced another PT, Angela, who was moving on: having kids and getting away from London, taking her six-thirty a.m. slot. He’d travelled over an hour on the Tube, rising from underground to overground in powdery summer-sunrise light. And arriving at Camelot, the security guard—they had a security guard—stopped him for questioning. “Don’t recognise you.” No, Liam told him, I’m new. He wouldn’t be convinced, and the gym manager had to be brought out. Douglas said it was fine, he was new, he had a class in ten minutes and there hadn’t been time to make him a lanyard. Douglas who’d told him at interview the day before that his dream’d been to work in Formula One, but life doesn’t let things work out, does it?—and who entirely lacked even the semblance of physical fitness, looking like an unharvested tomato sunscalded on the vine.

His first class was nine women and two men, the women serious, the men not. He had them doing low reps of dumbbell work, HIIT, ropes, skipping. They were more hardened than he’d imagined, and he upped and upped it, worried they’d think him too soft. Liam knew no one by name, but one of the women introduced herself to him afterwards as Charlotte. She hadn’t sweated at all. About fifty, she looked forty. The territory between her yoga pants and sports bra revealed a slit of belly, and the belly revealed two firm abdominals. Her tan was perfect, and seemingly neither bottle nor bed.

“So do you live around here, Liam? You’re new to the gym—new to the area too?”

“No, actually. I just moved to Camden Town.”

“Ah, Camden. It was all hippies and druggies in my day. Gentrified now, I suppose.”

“Getting that way, looks like.”

“Well, welcome. We’re a friendly lot here. But we focus meticulously on our health. Just—well, you might want to think about going in for a little more intensity. That’s only a piece of advice.”

Was it flirting? He hadn’t been flirted with in an oblique way before. Em, Em’s friends, had always been straightforward. Or was this friendliness, as shown by a woman of her age and class to a young man of his? Charlotte’s slight frenetic passion in the eyes could be read however you wanted. Ultimately the eyes told you she wasn’t to be bullshitted.

Later, in the staff area by the protein vending machines, he flicked through Tinder. Later still, at home in his studio flat, he continued working on YouTube, which had stalled at 15k subscribers and was only making him three hundred quid a month. That is, he filmed several takes of a video on pistol squat form, smiling all the while, but with nothing behind the smile. Was this life now? Commute, classes, videos, bed? Rice and chicken and shakes? Once done, he went back to The World’s End for a couple, which became a few—but he tempered himself, having to be up at five, and with nobody much taking an interest in him, this time.

*

Tinder before class; Tinder after class. He couldn’t help but think of it in terms of optimisation, metrics, regimentation. This wasn’t like what the apps were like in Wolverton. You had choices now, thousands upon thousands of them. Liam granted himself that his face wasn’t bad, was at least masculine, but he had, anyway, his physique as a cheat code here—and so, of his six Tinder pictures, he was shirtless in four.

The first date he went on was also the last date he went on, and therefore Tinder fulfilled itself, and he deleted it. He deleted it because he knew, after that first date, after meeting Tilly, there was no point, simply no point continuing to search, because he’d found, and all that was left was not to fuck it up. His heart felt glorious and giddy. At every instant, almost, he was thinking of her, or his thoughts below his thoughts were thinking of her. Worse, he had the six pictures from her Tinder (which he’d screenshotted) and the twenty-nine pictures from her Insta, thirty-five pictures total to ogle, fawn, simp for, lose sleep over. This hadn’t been the case with Em. This was illness, addiction—it was, he assumed, love.

She looked Lara Croftish, or at least the Lara Croft he recalled having his first wank to, pixels and bust, in the Tomb Raider Playstation game. Perhaps the echo explained something of her allure. Tilly had the same impossible figure: a waist your fingers could seemingly meet around, and a chest they certainly couldn’t. Yes, he was a man, and his desires were physical ones; but there was also her personality—character seemed the fit term—which he’d found compassionate, thrilling, hilarious, risqué. When the waiter spilled her glass of Shiraz into her lap, destroying her cream dress, Tilly’d had the grace to turn it into something humorous, bonding with him, defusing things, placating the apologies, and eliciting sympathy without meaning to, or needing to. She looked beautiful in that damp, reddened dress, which didn’t hold any import for being the gaffe of an underpaid kid, but only as the demonstration of her kindliness, even nobility. Yes, Liam would think on her in such a manner, and be sincere about it, too, fifty times a day.

On their second date they went to a wine bar. Her suggestion. He’d never enjoyed wine, but Tilly was the sort of companion who made whatever you were doing wonderful. Liam drank it the way you drink beer: gulping, wiping the mouth with the back of your hand. Ordering plenty.

“Are you working tomorrow? Shall we get really really drunk?” she said.

“I’m already on my way to drunk.”

“Well—when going through hell, keep going? Churchill said that, possibly apocryphally.”

“My classes aren’t till the afternoon. So I’ve got time to recover, yeah.”

“Good. That’ll be so much more fun. Let’s get a bottle. Let’s go wild. This is so fun. Don’t you think of life as a game? Things just happen. You can just jump on, decide to ride for a little while, jump off again. Life’s just there—you can take as much from it as you like. There’s so much happening—so much, always. You’re going in one direction, you can sidestep, you can change the whole thing. These waiters, they’re from Spain, they’ve lived all this life. What, where? Seville, Madrid, Valencia? Have they walked the Camino? I’m from fucking Hadley Wood. They have bullfights. We have barfights. Well. I haven’t seen one before. But you know what I mean? I’ve read about them. You create your own life. You can do anything. Let’s get really drunk. Let’s see what life has to offer? Right?”

He leaned forward. “You’re dangerous.”

“Ha. None of the guys I’ve ever dated before would speak to me like that. In a good way. You’re different.”

“You are. You really are. You’re tempting me. Temptress.”

“You’re so old fashioned for someone who’s totally not old fashioned. I’m “dangerous.” How do you look like an influencer but act like Wikipedia?”

“That’s the nicest compliment I’ve ever received.”

“I thought you said you had a girlfriend before? She never compliment you?”

Tilly didn’t know her lips were stuck with red wine, and her teeth were shaded. She looked perfect.

“She complimented me but in a very different way.”

Her eyebrows lifted up, which he thought was a move she’d practised. “What sort of a way?”

“Not an exciting way. More like I was a dog she liked.”

She laughed, a lovely laugh, but uncontrolled. “What? A dog?”

“Yeah. Like you’d say a dog is a good boy. I dunno. Just not in a mature, adult way.”

“Dog. Hm.” She paused, but then her freneticism forced her out of the silence. “Well, you were young.”

“Not young enough for it to not be weird. It weren’t that long ago.”

“If you were a dog, you’d be a pitbull.”

“A pitbull? Haha. Not necessarily a dog you’d wanna be.”

“Oh no, pitbulls are very popular.”

“Is it the hair?”

“No, you’re just a skinhead by the by. It’s the manner.”

He trailed one of his fingernails along her forearm and she shivered pleasingly. “Where are we going after this?” he said.

“Casino. Club. I don’t care. I want to really live.”

*

Next what he remembered was they were at the blackjack table. He had a stack of green and a stack of yellow chips; Tilly had two red ones. She was leaning forward towards the croupier, an ancient man with the yellow-white hair of age and spacers in his ears. Doing what, flirting with him? Liam took her wrist, not trying to grab her but to hold her. She pulled away—he stayed attached—she whipped her wrist hard so that his hand came off.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“What d’you mean what am I doing?”

“Don’t get like that with me. You wouldn’t want to piss me off Liam.”

*

He then helped her into an Uber, though she didn’t need his help. There’d been a few extortionate gin and tonics, even a shot—?—and Tilly was leaving by herself, a cab all the way to Hadley Wood. He was in Leicester Square, and it was so late it was empty, and the rain was coming down on plant leaves, and roofs, and terrible public sculpture. He waited for a bus; must’ve slept.

*

The next day he barely made it to work alive. He had to manage midday, not six-thirty, placed on the afternoon shift in a move of unconscious magnanimity by Douglas. Liam moped in the staff room on his phone, desperately chugging electrolytes and bananas.

Throughout the workout, Charlotte stared at him.

After his class, which he survived, though more sweaty and breathless than those taking part, Charlotte approached him. Her swishing arms made a polyester sound. Her look said determination. She stopped, just before him, the same height, smelling of roll-on and mint and a honey-based perfume.

“She came back totally, totally drunk,” Charlotte sneered, overenunciating. A mother’s voice, cornered. Under her eyes the bags had violet veins which reflected light, even under concealer. He sensed these tiny veins bulging, stressed, pumping.

“Sorry, who are we talking about?”

Yet he knew, didn’t he?

“Tilly.”

“Tilly?” He felt the hot rising vomit of exercise plus hangover, and just managed to suppress it. “What? Tilly? You know Tilly?”

“You aren’t allowed to see her Liam. You aren’t seeing my daughter. You’ve had the beginning, middle, and end of this. The end.”

“Tilly’s your daughter?”

“Yes of course she’s my daughter. You’re inappropriate for her. Don’t go on another of your little dates with her. The state she turned up in. Why, I’m extremely disappointed in your choices. I’d thought better.”

Liam understood, and forced himself to focus not on the coincidence but on the scene. “With respect, me and your daughter, we’re both consenting adults.” He spoke calmly, with manners.

“Stop trying to sound so reserved when you’ve dug up so much passion in me. Is what I’ve said not clear?” She crossed her arms—more scent came off her. Copper and spearmint and seawrack, he thought. The smell had the profile of a mist; you felt it should be visible. It was particulate. Liam enjoyed it guiltily.

“It is clear. I just don’t think I need to listen to you, Charlotte.”

She uncrossed her arms suddenly. Her hands went out by her sides, beseeching. “This is outrageous—”

“Actually I would say that what’s outrageous is you thinking you have the right to control me.”

“I pay you, don’t I, don’t I? Are you not an em-ploy-ee?” She spat her words. “I wouldn’t have Tilly seeing a boy who works on the reception of a hotel. Why should this be any different?”

“Look. We will probably see a lot more of each other. It’s best that—look, I think we got off on the wrong foot, and I’m willing to apologise.”

“I will certainly not be seeing any more of you. Nor you of me.”

“I mean because, dating Tilly, it’s more than likely that we’ll come across each other in life. Especially if things get serious. And, the fact I work here, and you come here.”

“No. And it isn’t that I’ll be leaving here, abandoning my routine. But I don’t think you should work here anymore. It isn’t going well, let’s be honest.”

“That’s an opinion you’re entitled to.”

“Yes, and we’ll see.” She stepped right up close to him. Their faces could’ve touched. Other than mint, other than syrup perfume and salt and deodorant, he smelt another smell: a woman’s smell, an older woman’s, like the smell of a thick stiff skirt on a hot day, like the smell of tights peeled down.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“You like my daughter, well. It makes sense that you’d like me too.”

Being hungover worsened the unreality. Taylor Swift in the background. This strong sweet beautiful smell. Few people in the gym, and nobody at their end, nobody looking. The noise of someone grunting, and the noise of a treadmill pounded by flat feet. Didn’t you always notice minor, irrelevant things in these moments of the highest sensation? The texture of the foam puzzle-pieces that made up the gym floor, a ribbed pattern—and how they were the same dimension of square as the ceiling tiles above them. There were water fountains in the gym which dispensed three temperatures of water, dispersed in cones rather than cups, and next to each of them, two monsteras in gold pots. Charlotte placed her hand on Liam’s shoulder.

“Well?” she said, eyeing him. She had the glare geese have in challenging you. Do something. Liam brought up a hand to her hand on his shoulder, meaning to bring it down, to pass her own hand back to her, declining it.

And as he did, she shouted, “Don’t you touch me. Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! Get off my hand! Don’t touch my hand! He’s touching my hand!”

Gymgoers started staring—though with bathos, for all of those in noise-cancelling headphones remained unaware. Charlotte had stepped back and now her challenging look morphed into something wounded, fearful, aghast. What was she doing? What deranged game?

Douglas came over, lightly jogging. “What’s going on? Liam?”

“It’s fine,” Liam said.

“He grabbed me. He grabbed my hand. We were having a discussion—a heated discussion. And he grabbed my hand, he clutched my hand and hurt me.”

“Liam. Go to the staff room now and wait for me there.”

“You serious? The atoms of my hand barely even came into contact with the atoms of hers. Like, come on mate, be real.”

“Don’t get smart. Go.” Douglas turned to Charlotte. “Are you all right? Let’s sit down—come with me over there. Liam, you’d better go home today. Go home.”

As she left, Liam left, and they both turned back, like lovers; over her shoulder, twisting her head, she smiled at him.

*

He messaged Tilly, explaining it all, feeling he had no one else to offer explanations. She didn’t reply. She aired him the rest of the day, and he had to be up at dawn the following, and, having heard nothing from anyone, no texts or calls or emails, went back, taking the Tube, making his long walk in bitter sunshine, and entering Camelot Fitness by the automatic doors.

Already it was air-conned to deep freeze. A few treadmills and bikes going. Someone sat on their phone on a stool drinking something matcha. And Douglas (picking at his polo top like a heron grooming itself, with his few remaining hairs troubled and zigzagging away from him) rushed over.

“Liam. Come into the staff room now.” He was shouting his whispers. “Come on. We can’t have anyone seeing you. In there, now, go.”

Liam felt a hand between his shoulderblades and he was trotted off into the office they called the staff room. There was a Lenovo on the desk. Both the chairs had exposed foam at their wrists. Douglas sat; he sat too. It smelled of nothing. The laptop was whirring angrily, its fan probably full of dust.

“Sit down,” Douglas said, redundantly, both of them already sitting. “Do you know what, it’s not good.”

“What?”

“Yesterday! Charlotte. Surely you remember.”

“Obviously I remember, but it’s like—I didn’t do nothing to her.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter that I didn’t do nothing to her? Why are we here then?”

“It’s optics. It’s all about optics, Liam.”

“What optics?”

“It doesn’t look good, does it, if a client of ours believes she was assaulted by a trainer of ours, does it?”

“No. Assaulted? But that isn’t what happened. It wasn’t assault.”

“And are people going to listen to her in this community, been coming to Camelot eight, ten years, or you, a few weeks in?”

“They should listen to reality.”

“No. Life is not like that. If it were we wouldn’t be working for other people. There are—there are hierarchies.”

“So? Truth matters too, Doug.”

“Douglas. So. Truth does matter—and here, truth’s on her side. Charlotte’s asking for me to let you go.”

“And are you gonna?”

“Well what choice do I have?”

It burned. Liam instantly stood up. “Whatever mate.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’re doing it to protect the business.”

“Well. Yes, I am? That is my job.”

“Yeah. Just following orders.”

“Well I’d be losing my job too if the business tanked, following this. Or if we fail to make profits.”

“Whatever man.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s no way you’re sorry.”

“Look. I’m going to pay your final month’s salary up front. But you don’t need to come back tomorrow. You’ll get paid. But it just won’t work, having you here. We’re lucky she isn’t going to the police. You know that, don’t you? That you’re lucky?”

He stormed out, feeling hot and enraged and, even, theatrical, tearing off his Camelot polo as he left the staff room. He threw it to the floor. They could see what a real body was like—something entitled fuckers of their kind would never achieve. He benched three plates now. This was a crèche for the listless rich, and he didn’t like being thought of as a pet to lust after. Yet they could look now. Look at these fucking delts. His left shoulder vein stuck out in a detailed curl like the beach-sand excretions of lugworms. These were postmenopausal women who were back at it, or women in their thirties with neglecting husbands and boyfriends, half of them dropped, and half prowling, and he didn’t give a fuck.

*

The World’s End on a weekday afternoon. Could an interior be windswept? It was. Liam simply had nothing else to do. Lager one, lager two—they vaguely assuaged. Lagers three and four were fine: five six seven and eight were not. He then began to cease making memories. There were women he made a pass at. Prawn cocktail crisps were crushed into powder on the hard floors. Arctic Monkeys definitely played, and Kasabian, and, for some reason, Buddy Holly. He tried to meet people and was rebuffed. Today, it seemed, everyone was content to drink alone. Or, not alone, but they already had friends to drink with. He should take his shirt off again, seek attention. He should jump onto the sticky tables and boot pint glasses into the air. He should scream; he should be happy with this life of his—and wasn’t. There was very little charm in drinking alone in the afternoon if it was the only thing you had to do. He redownloaded Tinder and swiped in the corner of the pub, sat next to a mirror, into which he occasionally glanced, seeing only the blur of his consciousness as it faded into drunkenness. Were those the eyes he had? Weren’t they sharper, better than small-town eyes? What would tomorrow look like? At nine o’clock the barman stopped serving him. “Too pissed fella. Go home. You live near here? You need someone to walk you?”

*

He woke up with his legs in bed and his upper body and head on the floor. Lifting his head, he was stung by sharp pain at the back of his scalp, like the feeling off a scab being torn away. It sounded the way ripped fabric sounds, only wetter. He righted himself and felt his head. Blood, and something gorier than blood. What? And his phone was going mad.

Liam was fully dressed, albeit dishevelled. There was a note safetypinned to his shirt. On it, in big capital letters, was written:

Took you home. You hit your head. Drink water.

*

Having lost the main part of his income, Liam took up YouTube content creation again, this time doubling down on his work ethic. He went through the Reddit guides to going viral, making clickbait titles and horny thumbnails, and feeling the loss of something within himself every time he did so. He posted once a day now, free from the commute. All in, he could plan, record, and edit a video, at home, in about an afternoon. This meant he was free in the evenings—and being lonely, he was more often than not at The World’s End.

By the autumn of that year it was obvious he would not make enough to sustain himself. He was several grand overdrawn. His subscriber count had gone up, from 20k to 25k. He could expect to bring in £400 a month against a rent of £1,100 a month. Plus the cost of pints, £200 a week. Plus bills, plus weights and ropes and foam rollers and all the other appurtenances of a YouTube career. And his food, twenty-five-thousand calories a week, more than a kilogram of it protein. Shakes, creatine, pre’. He considered going on benefits for a while, before thinking of his father in HMP Woodville, and decided, instead, on a sleet-dark morning when the buses needed their headlights, that he’d go back to coaching.

He got a job locally this time. It was extremely fast. He had his YouTube on his CV and one of the hiring managers had even seen a few of his videos. Start tomorrow, they said—freelancing with your own clients, no contract, use our spaces—and he did, that November, and he began to work himself free of debts, and spent Christmas at the pub, and went to the New Year’s fireworks at Ally Pally, drinking himself silly, and welcomed January in a state of happy hangover. He did the same the following year.

*

Surely it was from the drink. Liam had a full-length mirror in his studio flat, and began to see where his abs were losing definition. Had he contracted something? He was a little podgy. Lovehandles. His tone a little wan. There had been a few random shags. What, an STI? Venereal disease? He thought he looked like a basset hound, the skin hanging away from his face. The red underflesh of the eyelids. Illness and hangover hitting at once. He would increase his cardio—a few 10k runs, twenty mins of rowing at the end of each workout. When taking clients through theirs, he could join in. Box jumps, skipping. Leading by example, and exercising out of the rut. That was January’s plan, and it became February’s, and he stuck to it with some doggedness.

But in March there was news everywhere of the virus—from Wuhan, and after a ski trip made by a consultant doctor, it came over to the UK. 100 people infected, and the first death. The Chief Medical Officer became a celebrity. Interest rates reached the lowest level in history. The FTSE crashed. Some of Liam’s colleagues were staying away. People began wearing facemasks in the gym. 1,000 people tested positive. Then everyone was at home. Overnight there was no work; Liam’s self-employed status was unclear. He was left in his single room with his bed, gym equipment, clothes, laptop, a creeping black mould, kitchenette, kettle, shower, and fucked toilet.

*

Because his work collapsed, he applied for Universal Credit. He hadn’t worked long enough to qualify for an allowance or business loans, and he wasn’t able to be furloughed. He was given enough to pay his rent, and no more. All expenditure—food, bills—was to drive him into debt.

*

For some weeks he began to feel despair.

*

Liam thought, given the free time, he might at last make it at YouTube. But tens of millions of others, mostly young men, had also taken to YouTube. They’d bought every dumbbell available in the world on Amazon. They were going for a hundred quid each: he sold some of his. Eight hundred pounds, enough for a month.

He spent this money on beers during his one hour out of the flat each day. He could buy an eighteen-pack of lager for £16 at Tesco. There was nothing else to do. After work, of course. He’d film his videos, make his content, and then relax. But, sometimes, he’d have a beer in the morning. Told himself it was just when his fears were most present that he most needed it. He sat through the burning March and burning April heatwaves in his un-airconditioned room (the window with suicide latches) and listened to music, drinking, scrolling his phone, and, very occasionally, reaching a state which was, more or less, like crying.

*

Bridget called in June, when people could go out again. Her smoker’s voice was sweet because it existed for him in a happier time.

“What are you doing with yourself?” she said.

“In my flat. Not much. Chilling. Not much.”

“And work? Have they got you on furlough?”

“No. I was self-employed as a PT. But the timings didn’t work. I’m—I’m actually on benefits.”

“Shocking, these lockdowns.”

“I know.”

“They ain’t thinking about the people who aren’t doing the posh jobs.”

“They’re not, no.”

“Shocking. Sunak, Boris—the lot of ‘em.”

“I know.”

“Well. Me and Emma are getting along well, thanks for asking—”

“Sorry, I—”

“I’m teasing you. Well, maybe you’d like to come back. We have a spare room. You wouldn’t need to be paying any rent or anything. Just when the world’s gone mad. Cos I know your granddad’s gone. Might be nice to have some familiar faces.”

“Bridg—”

“Just think about it. Offer’s there. We could form a bubble.”

*

What choice really? He rented a van, moved everything, about a tonne of weight, and drove through the long bright empty motorway through a long bright empty summer back home.

Crumbled, post-industrial Wolverton, with viaduct, petrol station, pub, river, canal; its barber’s, Skoda garage, carpet wholesaler, supermarkets, charity shops, vape shops, betting shops; its inflorescing hogweed and prowling bindweed, celandine, cleavers, nettles, purple toadflax and willowherb. Kids on BMXs, and salt on your lip from the summer heat—and so on, incalculable impressions building up only to a tedious whole, a non-place of dead ambition, and piss up the walls, and domestic abuse, and twenty-thousand tacit dreams.

What was going to happen would always have happened, of course, and he knew that in the recesses of his mind, even before it had begun: he got back with Em. You couldn’t, under the pressure of proximity, not do as such. Former love was a patient in need of defibrillation. It wasn’t quite corpse, wasn’t quite awake—but there were opportunities. Yes, she saw him showering on his second day; or, coming out of the shower, with a too-small towel and a loose knot at his hip. Even in this drinking phase of his, she’d’ve considered him a one-in-one-hundred looker. Even when he had his low moods. So it was natural. As natural as school friendships, exclusionary in their total perfection, which felt like the only possible permutations of friendship in the world. But there were many schools worldwide, and any permutation was aided by closeness. Em and Liam, then: it was all a matter of household.

It became fucking, but: love? He no longer cared. They had ciders in the garden where the unmown grass grew navel-high, and you had to flatten its blades with lawn chairs to sit down. Grasses thrumming insect life. Bridg busied herself about the house behind them. The sun set between the houses’ backsides. You had to move your chair into the ray that reached past chimneystacks, rolling round towards the west, consciously keeping yourself in the heat. Relaxation required effort in Wolverton. It tired you out, the thing you were meant to do when tired. The sun on you, like a searchlight.

*

Liam was able to squeeze his squat rack into Bridget’s shed, just, though it wasn’t tall enough to do an overhead press, requiring you to step into the garden proper. But you could work out and you could sequester yourself, and you could have a shot of tequila in your pre-workout or protein shake, just to, as they say, as they all say, take the edge off. Not that he did much working out now, for life seemed postponed. And, at times, it felt as though he were in a tunnel with no end.

He began hiding things. At first, just a few beers as he woke up. Cans, to make less noise in the binbags than bottles. He hid his depressions. Then he felt nothing from beer, and moved to vodka. It took about six months. He was out of work, and it was another lockdown, so what was the use? Society seemed to welcome it, this permanent stasis, this unreality, and mañana sense of procrastinated life. Why not drink? He could clean himself up at a later date. There’d be time enough. He wasn’t an addict. He was someone who liked a drink and was perpetually holidaying. Up went the national debt; down went Liam—and he didn’t mind, really, he didn’t mind, he told himself.

Feeling very bad became normal, and to medicate it, he drank. He was never sure if the new spreading numbness was helping, or masking—but either way, masking was its own helping. His hands shook regularly, as bad as Parkinson’s. His skin smelled, and yellowed, giving out an odour somewhere between sweat and yeast. Em asked after him, and Bridget even more than Em, but he felt he must obfuscate whatever roiling he felt within, and kept up the decorum of aftershave, washing his hair, dressing properly. Bridget thought it could be Covid-19.

His first hospitalisation occasioned a family moment. They were family now: he’d begun calling Bridg “Nan”, as Em’d always done. He felt fine, with a little glass of vodka in hand, standing before the TV, the remote in his other. Then his vision went, and he blacked out, and he woke up on a trolley in the back of an ambulance, Em and Bridg with him. Had a seizure, they said. Shaking an awful lot, terrible, terrible. But they weren’t allowed into the hospital—Covid restrictions. Everyone was in masks again. Liam didn’t listen to much of what the paramedics or doctors had to say to him. Couldn’t: he had the dark tunnel around him now, in which he hated himself.

Finally, after all the hours of waiting, and a day, maybe two, he was discharged from MK Hospital, and they picked him up, and got a taxi home together. He clambered out, not able to make it up the stairs to bed, collapsing on the sofa. Bridg brought pillows and a blanket; Em watched. He slept, on and off, till four, waking with trembling limbs, vomiting weakly in a bowl they’d placed on the carpet. Then he saw Em—she’d slept in the armchair by his side, and was woken, Bridg must’ve heard too, because she came down, saying:

“You’ve got it on the carpet, Liam.”

“He’s a mess Nan.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t feel right. “Can I just get some more sleep?”

“Pisshead,” Em said.

“I’m sorry.”

“He’s an alcoholic, Em,” Bridg told her, defensive. He was so, so grateful.

“I’m not doing well,” he said.

“We can fucking see that,” Em said. She fluttered about, clattering, bringing forth rubber gloves, disinfectant, a bucket, a mop.

“I’m sorry.”

She went on at him, on her knees by the sofa, cleaning, wearing her rage out over ten minutes. Wouldn’t he have done the same, if he’d been the partner of Liam Cromwell, dealing with this?

*

In order to be hungover, you had to drink. In order to not be hungover, you had to drink. You were always either hungover or drunk.

*

Em had begun sleeping in a separate bed. Well: she’d moved from the bedroom which she shared with Liam to her childhood bedroom. It still had pink walls and unicorns on the curtains. The sheets were Bratz. It smelled of synthetic vanilla candles, buried in a drawer. Once or twice, while she was sleeping, Liam would stand in the door, his little water bottle of vodka in hand. Just hydrating. He watched her woodland-creature manner of sleeping. Paws up by the face. The hair ragged. She didn’t snore, but her breath was dry and audible in that overheated room.

*

“I’ve got to help you Liam,” Bridg said to him one day, as he unspooled on the sofa, half naked, his gut hanging down his side like shopping bags full of shopping. Handing him toast with marmalade, she asked, “Can you stop? Can I help you stop?”

“I can’t stop. I’m so sorry. Please leave me alone.”

“I’m tryin’a help. I know down at church they have these courses—they’re for people who are in need of a helping hand.”

“I couldn’t go to that. I feel too rough. I don’t want to be seen. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

“But to stop it before it gets worse?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

*

He tried, a few times, to get back into lifting. But he didn’t have much willpower left to him. And he couldn’t lift heavy now. He did dumbbells, sometimes, in his bedroom, shaking, shaking. To what end? he thought, having another drink. And then he began to have other thoughts. Thoughts which had existed, and which he had not been brave enough to look at, but which now excited him.

*

London, great offeror, was likewise the taker of takers. Giving energy, it drew energy from you on equal terms, and it was for you to maintain autonomy over the equilibrium. Lean in too little or too much—well. Those of indefatigable, headlong character were liable to thrill in its atmosphere, or be drowned in it.

Liam drowned. Whereas he might’ve done something, had he been a stronger person, had he been able to stand things a little more, had he had the fortitude. That wasn’t the person he was born as. Or, perhaps born as, but with events interceding—Dad, Mum, then Granddad, life from the off nothing more than a coming to terms with loss, of being beat down and built up and beat back down again, nothing ever going right, all good times preludes only to bad. And you could undergo a lot of this, he’d found, more than a lot, but then there came that which you could not undergo. Like an emetic—like one drink beyond your limit. You began seeing a certain horizon which, though terrible, was less terrible than the other terror.

No, he couldn’t stand it. He didn’t have the strength, in the end. Maybe he had been making his body strong to counteract a strength he lacked. There were mothers, weren’t there, shaped like old turnips and overborne by the weight of efforts, who nevertheless turned out, daily, feeding and raising children and keeping homes—strong women. There were men who sat silently at computers for forty years, strong enough to carry despair with them and never let it have its victory. Or children who, seeking friends at the age of most need, found only others’ cruelty—and who were, despite everything, able to go on. No, maybe Liam lacked something that they had. The sole perfection he’d had proposed to him, his birthright, was not of the right sort. Could he be blamed? He had tried, hadn’t he?—and trying was its own success, even where it was failure. That was, anyway, what he’d wished to believe about himself. And hadn’t.

*

It wasn’t only to be Bridg and Em at Liam’s funeral: his Dad came, on release from the cell where he lived which was a short walk from the train tracks where Liam’d died. And it wasn’t only the three of them—thirty or so schoolfriends who still had memories of how he’d been when they’d known him were there, gossipy, teary, keen for the wake. Yes, and Bridg and Em, left behind in Wolverton, had to host it, for who else was there?

*

His father placed onto his coffin cultivated roses and lilies. Not cow parsley, not bluebells, not brambles, not dandelions. Nothing wild.

*

For there are in life ways of bettering and ways of not; and that which opens up as the path to take is only rarely the right path, being more often the opportune one, the close one, the only one available. Real knowing is not knowing how to head back, but knowing to head to the unseen end. In some, the end cannot be reached. That is a rule of life, true and ghastly. Some don’t succeed enough to fail. Tragic lights shine both least and shortest.

* * * * *

Thank you for reaching the end of this mammoth short story. Everything I write is free when I publish it, but please become a Paid Subscriber to support me:

Subscribe now

If you can’t, it would mean a huge amount if you could share this post:

Share

Jay said, “Yeah, this’ll be perfect right there. It’s already going that sort of like pink peach colour. Shot list says we want it to be full sunset, like that fucking orangey, burning type look. Like, all over here the clouds will be red and the sun’s coming down and’ll go that bright shining like, really like fiery glowing sunset style.”

““Sunset style”?” said Poppy.

“You know. When it’s like, boom. Like, when it’s popping off. The sun sunmaxxing, you get me.”

He had the camera. Earlier, they’d finished for their next post, mostly together as a couple. And they already had one of just Jay. Needed therefore was closure, was the last image: Poppy, alone.

“Here good?” she said.

“Yup. I think so. Yeah. It looks so good with that rock formation. They’re so photogenic. Genuinely perfect.”

“Great.” She paused. “When? Should I pose now?”

“We need to wait for the sunset.”

Poppy turned and looked into the sun. It was definitely still day. It maintained a yellow equipoise. And it wavered, wobbled, moving more around itself than downwards. “How long does that look to you? About, say, ten minutes?”

“Ten. Maybe fifteen?”

“Let’s get a few shots in the meantime then.”

She posed: they regrouped: it was agreed that without sunset popping off the pics were generally flat. So they waited, each scrolling. An elderly man, probably Italian, wandered into the frame of where the shot would be. He stood like a tripod, leaning into his cane. Poppy and he were at the very edge of the fencing at the cliffside, chickenwire coming unfurled, a hundred feet to fall beneath them. Sea, and rocks, and wild olives and wild capers, and woodbine, bougainvillea, myrtle—Poppy knew them because she’d looked them up on an app.

Now the old man sighed, looking over the cliffs at the sea towards the sun, as if he comprehended something more movingly beautiful than they, or as if he could perceive a better Instagram post. Poppy watched him. His eyes blinked slow, with the almost affected slowness of an older person. Could eyes unconsciously blink that slowly? They took over a second to reopen. He was basking. She had never seen basking before—never seen it, or never realised what it was. Marbella, Rio, Bali, Gozo, Naxos: she and Jay’d never basked. Reflected onto from the light of the strong sun, his skin adopted that fucking orangey, burning type look. He had a moustache, shaped like a flight pillow. He had incredible dark rich smooth Brazil-nut eyes. He smiled into the sunset, which was approaching now. Poppy hit her vape.

“Is he gonna like—”

“Jay, don’t—”

“I doubt he speaks English, like—hey bro. Bro. We’re about to try and take a photo here if you don’t mind. Bro. Poppy he’s literally just gonna stand there and we need to get the shot in a sec.”

“We’ve got time. He’ll move.”

“What is he even doing?”

“He’s just looking.”

“Well it’s weird. Why he’s been looking for so long.”

“It hasn’t been that long.”

“Is he looking at the sun? Does he not know you’re not supposed to do that?”

“He’s looking near the sun. He’s looking out at sea. At the boats. The clouds.”

The old man, at this, seemed to have discerned their meaning—he turned, lurching with his cane, to face towards Jay. Jay lowered his phone. The old man’s smile remained. But his face was in shadow. He took a step, and the sunset became sensational. Behind him it quivered with liquid power, like a bird’s-eye view into volcano. He took another step. The floor was cracked with scrub roots. He swung his cane again. He stepped. It caught, as he stepped, and the contrary momentum of his legs and his stuck stick made him fall. He tottered twice, and his legs ceased to help. He came down hard on a hip. There was a crack.

“Oh my God,” Poppy said in a burst.

“Fuck.” Jay ran forward. “Fuck whadda we do? Call 999.”

“It’s not 999 here.”

“911? Put something under his head.” Jay said this but then himself supported the man’s head, whipping his t-shirt off (glorious pecs, abs, lats, delts) for a makeshift cushion. He moaned. His eyes were livestock’s, in trusting fearfulness. Many times, he screwed them away under wrinkles. His hands loosely patted himself, by the hip, by the lumbar. The last joints of each finger turned in the wrong direction; the nails were clubbed. He couldn’t seem to believe that English speakers were the people caring for him.

“Are you all right, sir? Signore? 911 isn’t working,” she said.

“I don’t know what the number is here. Fucking Europe. Fucking—I thought we Brexited.”

“Wait. Emergency dial. It’s calling.”

“Fuck. Yes. Are you okay? Are you okay? Can you feel your legs? Mate?”

“Do they even have ambulances on the island Jay?”

They stayed with him, in panicked pietà, while flawless sunset seared, mellowed, bruised, passed.

*

Poppy and Jay weren’t brought in the ambulance with him—the world’s smallest, it turned out, a tuk tuk of a two-seater, actually profiled in the Guinness Book of Records—and so stayed, in faded day, at the clifftop. Then twilight. Then dusk. They’d been so perturbed they hadn’t needed to scroll. They just sat, as little stars picked themselves out in the sky.

“What a weird day,” Jay said. “Well. We’re going back tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh shit. But so there won’t be a sunset tomorrow we’ll get to see.”

“No.”

“How are we going to fulfil the shot list then?”

“Does it even matter if we fulfil it or not?”

“Of course it matters Poppy. Oh my fucking god. This is so shit. We might not even get paid.”

“Chill Jay. That man could be dead for all we know.”

“Dead from a fall?”

“Well, yeah, duh, that’s like number one old-person-dying-cause.”

“I just think we’re fucked. We have 2k riding on this.”

“It’ll be fine. We can do sunrise instead if we have to.”

Jay was on his phone. “No. No. Weather shit tomorrow. Clouds. Unseasonable clouds.”

“It’s fine. We have five pics.”

“Not the full shot list.”

“Well ring Steven if it matters so much to you.”

“What? Poppy? What? It should matter to you as much? Our livelihood?”

“We’ll make more—”

“Fuck it I’m ringing Steven.”

“Go ahead. It’s chill—”

“Yep, Steven, hey Steven yeah so, bit of an odd one. Yeah so we—yep, Capri, yep—we were taking our sunset photos, last one of Poppy with the Prada bag, yeah, yeah, exactly, yep, and so anyway so this old Italian guy’s there and it’s a nightmare right, cos we’re worrying and he’s sort of in shot and not moving, and he’s sort of just at the edge of the cliff staring. So anyway sunset’s coming down, yep, yep, yep, no, no he fucking decks it, like goes flying and breaks his hip and we’re calling the ambulance, so—no, exactly, that’s what I’m saying, we didn’t get the shot. Yeah. Yeah. Yep, I told her that, but she didn’t believe me, no I get it”—he placed his hand over the phone, saying, “Poppy, that’s it, we’ve lost it, two grand down the drain, voided our contract.”

“I really don’t care by the way.”

“Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah we’ll be back early tomorrow morning. Yep, see you. Anyway. All right. All right, okay, bye—bye.” Jay paused. “How can you not care?”

“I just don’t. I just fail to. He could’ve died.”

“Yeah he could’ve, fucking, jesus, I do know that!”

“And you’re more concerned with us?” She hit her vape in a miffed way.

“It’s just, people die all the time. Why’s he up here this high? He has a walking stick. Why’s he come up this high on the mountain. How the fuck has he? Hang on. Hang on.”

“What are you doing?”

“Calling Steven back.”

“Fuck sake.”

“Steven, Steven, yep, I’m putting you on speaker Steven. Can you hear us?”

Steven said, “All good. Ya.”

Jay said, “So look, Steven—”

“So look, Jay, Poppy. Guys, very, very disappointing that you missed the shot. I get extenuating, right, whatever? Even so. Even so. Very disappointing.” His voice was always more pronounced on the phone—that of a politician, tempering himself for social inferiors. Plum lite. Ersatz Eton.

Poppy said, “This old guy, he could’ve died?”

“Is that Poppy, Poppy, I get that.”

“So? What were we supposed to do? It’s just one picture.”

“Yeah, just a picture, just our brand being soiled guys, c’mon guys. So what if Prada now thinks we’re unreliable? It’s not one two-grand miss. It could be twenty, forty grand over the next couple years. Right guys? So you see why it’s disappointing.” As he spoke you could picture the tilt of his head, the blocky chin resting on the fist, the Brando, the Mussolini mouth.

“It is disappointing, Poppy. Steven’s right.”

“Shut up Jay. Listen Steven, what on earth would you have done then?”

“Well I wasn’t there. I can’t know all the possible permutations of a situation I wasn’t in. But it’s likely, thinking abstractly, thinking hypothetically, isn’t it likely that there was another solution? Like, move him a bit.”

“Move him a bit? What the fuck?”

“Move him, I mean, get the shot, wait for the ambulance. Presumably it didn’t arrive instantly. Presumably there was a lull.”

“A lull, this man could be dead and you’re talking lull?”

“Well what did you do in the meantime? You had, ample, ample time to get the shot. And it’s only twenty percent for me, four hundred quid, okay, not important. But it’s the two grand you’ve missed and all the future potential two grands. So, so disappointing guys.”

“We’ve fucked it Poppy.”

“Shut up Jay. We haven’t. We acted human.”

Steven said, “Acted human; isn’t every action you could have performed fundamentally human, Poppy, being, as you both are, humans? Fundamentally speaking, really, was this guy not on death’s door anyhow? Really?”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Poppy stop, give me my phone back.”

“I’m hanging up on you now, Steven.”

She did. It became wonderful quiet nighttime, there, in the Bay of Naples, full of summer bugs and warmth and the slow, far-off heave of waves. Twinkling ferries and yachts and tankers moved imperceptibly, another set of stars in another darkness. Jay hit his vape.

“Well you sure fucked that mate.”

““Mate”, Jay, when have you ever called me mate?”

“I don’t feel like calling you babe, babe.”

“Okay mate.”

“Stop.”

“I feel like I’m the only one who’s got any sense of compassion here?”

“What, in all of Capri? All of Italy? You’re mental.”

“No, of you, Steven, me.”

“Well we don’t give Steven twenty percent to be compassionate. We give him twenty percent to get us work.”

“Work is not worth the trade-off of killing people.”

“We aren’t killing people. We didn’t kill that old guy.”

“I meant me.”

“You’re not dead.”

“Not literally, no.”

“Don’t get you.”

“You’re misunderstanding me intentionally, Jay.”

“Okay. Cool. Shall we get off this fucking mountain?”

“Gladly.”

“Shall we stop being sanctimonious and up our own arse for a second babe?”

“Oh fuck off. Fuck off.”

*

After a humid, distant, hotel-bed night of recrimination, they got up for the half-six ferry. Poppy led the untalkative, half-asleep checkout, Jay apparently fascinated by the live FTSE feed on his phone. They left the hotel under greige dawn. Capri screeched with the early shuntings of café shutters. Just like Lisson Grove and childhood and rain which fell like snow. Those birds which had awoken stayed silent.

Poppy was only treated to dialogue when there were things needing talking about: passports, booking emails, apt queues. Otherwise, Jay had his cap on, hoodie up, and AirPods in. He maintained his aloofness until he wished to talk, which he did when they found seats on the ferry. Blue leather, sticky. A smell of bleach, croissants, and vomit. He removed just the one AirPod.

“We can’t split up, dyou get me, because of our profile.”

Poppy was amazed. “Split up? What?”

“I mean, you know what I mean, we can’t break up now because all our business is tied into us as a brand. Poppy and Jay, I mean.”

“What are you saying to me? What are you trying to say? I’m starting to feel ill. Break up? What are you saying? Where’s this come from?”

Jay’s voice went low and serious and transactional. “Come on Poppy. Things are obviously not working. I don’t think they have been for a while.” He patted her thigh with the flat of his hand.

“We have one row and—”

“It’s nothing to do with the row—”

“How can it not be to do with the row when we’ve just had a row and this is the convo that follows on from it?”

He vaped. “Well no but yeah the row has helped to clarify things.” He said the word “clarify” and it disgusted her.

“Are you serious? Are you joking?”

“Do you think things have been working? Answer truthfully.”

“Yes.”

“Then you can’t be honest with me.”

“No, I honestly do. I love you, Jay?”

“You can love me and not think things are working out. That’s not, they’re not separate, what’s the phrase? Both of those things can be true.”

“Do you love me?”

The ferry had been moving, and she hadn’t noticed. At her words he looked out over the thick, texturous sea. Watching blank grey spikes and voids. His eyelashes long and in concert with the brim of his cap, two curves aiming to the same vanishing point. They blinked and he turned to her.

“Well it’s not about that—”

“Do you? Have you ever?”

“Of course I have. Whether I do now. That I don’t know.”

“So this is how you break up with me? I feel sick.”

“That’s seasickness, here.” He gave her a paper bag from the net pocket of the seat in front. She tore it from his hand so that it fell to the carpet.

“Fuck off. You’re really ending things like this? I can’t believe it. Jay. Jay I can’t believe this?”

“No I’m not. I said. I think we need to think really carefully. Because how are we going to continue to, what’s the word, not monetise, but, dyou get me, how are we going to continue our work? We’re not worth anything like we are together, alone.”

“Yeah. Yeah Jay. I agree. I agree. Yes.”

“Great. That’s so good. That’s so productive.”

“I’m fucking? joking? Being sarcastic? Are you real?”

“What? How is it not important. Our finances—”

A rushed announcement came through a broken loudspeaker in Italian, or perhaps Neapolitan; they understood it because it matched circumstance. The ferry pitched up as it hit a wave, which Poppy thought must be vast. They were pressed back into the leather of their seats, sweating. And as they rode out the wave, the front of the ferry slammed down into the water. They were flung forward into the leather of the seats ahead. She hit her head. His elbow banged her awkwardly.

“Fuck, sorry.”

“Now I feel seasick Jay. I feel really fucking seasick.” She stopped and put a hand to her mouth and sounded a resonant low stomachy Om, as if she were in yoga class.

“It’s all right. It’s waves. Here.” He took her hand. He then placed his other hand on their hands. Holding her while she struggled with her innards.

“I feel sick, no, no.”

“Come here.” Now he took his hands away and wrapped a whole arm around her like a huge warm tumbledried lint-smelling blanket. His large arm, holding her. Poppy nuzzled; she felt that she was at a point of surrender in which, given her nausea, given what was collapsing, she might as well lose herself in totally, might as well submit into a passivity which was appealing because it had, in a manner, power over what dominated it. It was like being sick and accepting being sick—was, indeed, sickness. Many kinds of sickness, together.

She hated him, was terrified, loved him dearly, hurt in every pore, and he comforted her, he comforted her, he was such a great comfort.

*

Safe on the Naples quayside they resumed their discussion. Jay had been talking about their becoming a “business unit”. Ending their relationship, but staying as one for the sake of their brand. To Poppy, this was literally what Hell must’ve been. Not just to have the loss of the thing, but to be daily confronted in your grief with its consolation’s undermining. And he hit his vape and breathed blueberry air out of both nostrils.

She said, “So you’re more worried about how this affects your bank balance than our feelings?”

“Yeah. I am, yeah. Because all the feelings are dead.” He was cold brilliance, failing to look at her. Sitting on a block of concrete he had his knees drawn up and his hands holding his ankles and one hand also holding his vape, and he had his hoodie tight and looked off into nothing, eyes squinting.

“They can’t die.”

“They have for me.”

“You can’t not have a past anymore.”

“Well I’m not very big on regrets. So.”

“So you’re saying goodbye, you have no regrets, your feelings are dead, it’s basically as if I don’t exist, but you want to go on having some sort of financial relationship with me?”

“Like, a form of that, yeah. I didn’t never love you. I’m not sure I don’t love you right now. But this—this what-we’ve-got? I want it to be different to that. Something else.”

“You’re so callous. So fucking callous.”

“It’d be more callous of me to stay with you lying.”

“To say it like this though.”

“How can I say it in a way that makes what I feel any less true? It’s going to hurt however I say it. God. Let me at least have recognition from you that I’m treating you like an adult. Give me that. Fucking jesus.”

The sea seemed to’ve relaxed now. The sky was still greige. After holding on through the hike down the mountain, through the nighttime streets, in their humid bed, checking out of the hotel, getting to the ferry, waiting for the ferry, boarding the ferry, almost throwing up on the ferry, embracing, disembarking, sitting down on cubes of concrete rebar, hearing the words “business unit” uttered by her boyfriend to describe their love, Poppy finally, against her willed dignity, broke—and she cried desolately, that warm grey Naples morning.

*

You couldn’t’ve said they didn’t try. She started off saying they needed distance, and he granted her a week. A week without messaging. They hadn’t gone a day without messaging in five years—not one day, perhaps no more than nine or ten hours, sleep excepted. Jay moved in with a mate. The spare room would’ve been too close. Into the emerging gulf Poppy Deliveroo’d fried chicken, cheesecakes, muffins, iced coffees, and had them in bed, their bed, which she was beginning to perceive as her bed, and changed the sheets to those she liked most, which he disliked, and changed them back to the ones which still held a little of his smell. Then he sent her a “hey”. She replied. He replied. They began talking. Then, on neutral ground, a pub, they met up. He said quite openly he regretted how he’d done things; she regretted that “things” had had to happen. Still, though, he had his idea of the business unit. She eyerolled past that. But next time, they relapsed, fucking when they shouldn’t have. He stayed over. The morning proved difficult.

Being a business unit entailed going to various holidaylike locations to take romantic photos devoid of all romance. They went to restaurants and went ice skating and had bubble tea; they tried pumpkin carving and go-karts and yachting; backdrops included orchards, fields, fjords, skyscraper viewing decks, decks to view skyscrapers, beaches, jungles, gardens, vineyards. Much of this was expensable to Steven’s agency. They had successful weeks of this, during which Jay grew colder whenever Poppy drew nearer. He seemed to be resisting any convincing she might do, any action which might bring them back to what they were. When on trips, he insisted first on separate beds, and then on separate rooms. Stung, Poppy began texting other guys, but with no conviction.

Two months into the refracted form of their relationship, Poppy and Jay walked into Paddington Station, and a young girl, thirteen or fourteen, stopped them.

“You’re Poppy and Jay.”

“Nah,” Jay said.

Poppy was silent.

“You are. Look.” As if to prove to them who they were, she pulled out her phone and brought up their Insta.

“They do look like us, yeah,” Jay said.

“You’re them. I love you guys.”

“What’s your name?”

“Perdita.”

“Great name.”

Perdita turned now. “You’re Poppy. You’ve got incredible outfits like oh my fucking god. I’m like constantly yearning for your looks, you know? Like, amazing.”

Poppy was still silent. Some jagged hurt entered into her. It rose warm to her temples and throat. That this random fan—that she might be able to cause that? She saw that Jay saw her feeling, and he quickly moved them on, fobbing Perdita off with a quick selfie. The girl squealed, left them, more interested in her prize than what it depicted. And Poppy’s face flushed as it had on the ferry. Being known as his girlfriend for the sake of branding? To ardent children?

She roused herself. She told him she couldn’t, wouldn’t do it. Fuck Steven, fuck money. He tried to soothe, to calm. For himself—he did so for himself, she realised. Why had she allowed herself, in her desperation, to be carried along? With Jay as the protagonist of both their lives? This time, he cried, and she didn’t know why it should be this time. If the breakup had meant so little—why now did the finalisation of what he’d begun matter to him? Poppy left him, left Paddington, went out into London, alone.

*

What she was to lose, then, was this: they’d first met on a cold day, and, over drinks, he’d taken her two hands to warm in his two hands. It was before the Second Lockdown. They’d been sat outside, under faux furs and patio heaters. It’d been cocktails—espresso martinis for her, Manhattans for Jay. Because their love had yet to thrive, they hadn’t had to capture anything, and so, looking back, she found she had no photographs. (She had known this already.) She’d known that they’d been too caught in the moment to care about pics for posterity, about memories other than those being made. His teeth hadn’t been overwhitened then. She’d not gone in for whole foods. She knew these things through a forced recollection. Five years ago; and only their then-casual social media presence; and no Steven; and no deadlines. Working at the florist; he at the bodyshop garage. Jay’d been nervous and made joke after joke, half of them landing, but all of them earnest. She’d liked, more than any ability to tell good jokes, that he felt the need to tell them, in order that he might make her enjoy herself. And she’d liked the vulnerability his chumminess meant.

He was attentive. Flowers, and paying, and asking after her, and texting goodnight and good morning—yes, these, but also with a raw care for what she desired, for where her life was headed and how he could be of help. A couple of friends had supposed it was just about fucking. “10/10 fittie tbf.” Did they see this side of him, though? How he put a pillow on his chest for her when they watched films on his laptop? How he’d always be first up, always ready with yoghurt and fruit and honey? Granted, he was gorgeous. There was no changing or avoiding that great fact. But she wouldn’t’ve been with him had he not other qualities of character that made him more than another model. (She’d had her share, and, besides vapidity, narcissism was their main trait, no doubt an occupational hazard.) There was something about him.

Had this past Jay gone? Or was the present Jay always latent? How could his major new selfishness have been within the man she’d met five years before, who’d had puppyish rizz and real self-doubt?

In the end, it wasn’t missing one shoot that was to damage their income, but the general breakdown of their love. She would now have lost the whole career to have Jay back as he was in the beginning. They did some desultory ex-to-ex texting. He seemed depressed, or he seemed to wish her to take away the impression he was depressed, or he so failed to put effort into their messaging that it was, in effect, as if he were depressed, at least from her perspective. Poppy met him for three or four coffees, trying together to parse the breakup. They didn’t swear or shout or cry. They came to recognition. The business unit ceased, and with it all their moneymaking. ‘Poppy and Jay’ was archived, and later sold. Fitting, that romance and finance went at once. One thing mundane, quantified, ubiquitous, deeply understandable; the other thing an unclutchable enigma. Where did their passion go, their kindness? The love for which they had been struggling? It had ended, slowly, and continually, and irrevocably.

*

Life would have to recommence. So she said to herself. By New Year’s, she had oodles of resolutions. To write a book, to learn Spanish, to take up guitar again. Cooking: Provençal recipes from Elizabeth David, of red-yellow tomatoes, oils, olives, rich chicken and fowl, garlic, pine nuts, capers, white beans, sautéed fish. Her old gym-and-yoga routine, but focused, with a notepad, with goals. She moved in with a group of girls and got a job at a charity doing social media marketing.

Poppy went on walks now. She loved to see spring arrive. She loved the ache of a hard walk, and the warmth of your body in the cold. Snowdrops, et cetera. Perhaps they were a means of reclaiming a way of seeing the world. For a long time, she had lived life secondhand. All the migratory birds returned. She would not have known their rhythms before. They drawled and sang. Instinctively going for her vape, Poppy remembered she’d given it up.

On one walk, a Tuesday, late, around sunset, Poppy bumped into Steven walking his dog. Why was he at the Heath? He spoke; she was too overwhelmed.

“Poppy, hi! Been ages. How are you? How are you getting on?” His enormous tilted block of head, like that concrete rebar that morning.

“Oh, fine. No, yeah, really good actually. Thanks. And you? Your kids okay? Miriam?”

“Miriam, the kids, yeah they’re all good. Tom’s at uni now. Durham.”

“Can’t believe it.”

“Ya. He’s eighteen.”

“Wow.”

“I know. Old fart like me starts to feel like a very old fart when you have a son at uni.”

There was a momentary lull—he seemed to see beyond her—within her—and she said at last, “And Jay? Do you see him?”

“Oh, Jay. Yeah. Haven’t you seen our posts?”

“No. Deleted Instagram.”

“You did? Well, good for you. I know I shouldn’t be saying that. But yeah, Jay and Lily are doing pretty well. I think they’re up to 600k followers now.”

“Lily?”

“He didn’t—ah. Lily’s his new girlfriend. I say new. Must be six months now.”

“Right, yeah of course. No, I did know. He told me. I’d forgotten that was her name.”

“They seem pretty happy. And you? What are you up to?”

“Oh, marketing for other people now instead of doing my own stuff. It’s slightly more serene.”

“That’s great. I’ve never really understood how all my clients do it.”

“And who’s this?”

“Oh I haven’t introduced you to Tallulah. Yeah. She’s allowed outside now.”

A floppy spaniel puppy. “She’s amazing. The big brown eyes.”

“I know. She likes you.”

Tallulah did like Poppy. She jumped up to her knees and nipped her fingertips.

“Well I should probably be getting on.”

“Me too. Anyway, Poppy, be in touch. Would be good to see you back in the business.”

“Thanks. I’ll consider it.”

“See you.”

“See you, Steven. Bye Tallulah. Good girl. Good girl.”

*

Lily. He couldn’t, could he, have chosen a girl who wasn’t also named for a flower? Poppy. Lily. Poppy and Jay. Lily and Jay. The same rhythm, the same letter Y.

*

She recalled the morning she left her mum’s flat in Lisson Grove. You still wore facemasks then. Jay had been so boyish, renting a Luton van, insisting on carrying everything. He pulled up onto the curb and she was unduly terrified he’d get a ticket. “Loading—it’s loading, people understand loading. They’re not gonna care. I’ll say I’m a bailiff.” She’d said, “In a way, you are.” He laughed, carrying boxes of her life into the cold white fridgelike back of the van. Later, they rode high in the cab and he drove fast, sort of eloping, sort of growing up, headed for Highgate and a half decade of tarnished ease. That evening, sealed boxes arrayed on the living room carpet, they lay on the floor and fucked, not even waiting to have assembled the bed, nor waiting to let the memoryfoam breathe.

*

Tucked up under covers in mad darkness that night she redownloaded Instagram and searched lilyandjay and found, the first result, his new account and his new girlfriend, a girl who seemed to resemble her, Poppy, in ways superficial and beyond superficial, down to their hip-to-breast ratio, their height, the shade of their hair, the clothes they wore. (The latter could be forgiven if they’d been provided as freebies, but in the choices from the packages of clothing sent to them by brands they appeared to have the same eye, the same manner of selection, to favour the same colours.) Poppy couldn’t help but let the words “improvement” and “upgrade” move through her mind. And in the style of pic uploaded, was there any difference? The shots were the same: he had merely supplanted her with another face.

Jay was wrong for her, he was limited, his intelligence was nothing like hers. He had been cruel, and, worse, he had been honest about his apathy. He was flawed, narrow, finite, in much of himself still a boy, and he was moody, fitful, fickle, often sour; yet, hadn’t he been, for a while, what life was for her? For a few years, he was the end of all her means. He launched ships, and every path led to him.

For a few years—now was now, though. The horror of being an influencer which she had escaped was this: she could see that, anyone could see that, on their individual profiles, Jay (120k) had fewer followers than Lily (250k). That life and worth could be so quantified—it wasn’t worth the qualifying. It was so blatant as to be beyond analysis. It was just a cause for tears. She was freezing in bed that night, even with the heating on. Her toes and soles would not warm. Jay still making content, headed newly to the same places.

Driving down the road in Lisson Grove they’d gone over the canal and past the cricket ground and she hadn’t been able to keep her hands away—there he was, the forever man, and she clutched his left thigh through his cargoes. He laughed and pretended to brush her away, but he didn’t really want to, and she saw from the swelling of the fabric that the whole thing was as exciting to him as to her. She wouldn’t go further—that was enough, and the fact of its tantalisation was more gratifying than taking the next steps would be. Wasn’t it lovely that the comfort and safety of a new life might be visualised in the old ways, men as boys, so ready to be understood, so eager and madcap and excitable? Poppy had no such methods herself. He drove the roads with his teeth grinning every mile. She was acting forward, while, inside, never having felt more innocent, nor more glee, nor more beautiful apprehension at this beginning of beginnings.

Yet. Under covers in the dark she stared at Insta. Their followers, together, Lily and Jay’s, were about double what hers with Jay had been.

*

*

*

If you aren’t a Paid Subscriber, please consider it, for the price of one coffee:

Subscribe now

And if you’re able, please share this story:

Share

“Is that inventable?”

“You know what I’m saying Tommy.”

“Googling. Someone called Sombrero.”

“Latino?”

“Oh wait—Sobrero, Italian. Lol, “a thick and viscous fluid.””

“Are we gonna book this holiday?”

“I dunno. Why are you always thinking about getting away all the time? What’s wrong with here?”

“It’s normal to book holidays.”

“I know it is. But this many?”

“A holiday is not an escape from life. It’s an apotheosis of life. It’s life life. You know?”

“Kinda. But life’s also life life.”

“Life can be. Holidays you’re like, I dunno, expediting things.”

“Which things?”

“Good things. The nice things. Meals, drinks, walking.”

“We are having a drink on a walk right now.”

“But not in a holiday sort of way.”

II

“White chocolate…your skin smells of white chocolate. Or, what’s that, cocoa butter. Close up.”

“Yours—gimme your arm. It’s hard to say. Sort of shower gel. But not really actually. Like, sort of chemical-y—”

“Chemical-y—”

“Not chemical-y, I meant to say like, nutrients, no, I mean like, chemical-y, yknow, like the sort of fruity chemical-y clean-smelling smell of shower gel?”

“I smell clean.”

“Well yeah? That isn’t something to get disappointed about. I could’ve said you smell like rancid shit or something.”

“It’s not exciting, though.”

“Well, it’s not about the smell, it’s about the person. You can’t have a sexy smell. You smell like Edward, and Edward’s hot to me. So you smell hot to me, but, in objective terms, you also smell of shower gel.”

“Hot to you. And both hot and not. As in the transubstantiation, I’m both the blood and have the properties of blood but not the blood. To you.”

“You’re going all Catholic again, I don’t get it. I didn’t mention blood. Shower gel.”

“To you.”

“You’re hot to me, what’s wrong with me saying that?”

“What’s wrong with your saying that from my perspective is that that implies that it’s only because you’re into me that I’m hot, I’m hot relative to your perception, and so in the same way I’m not hot to anyone else. Right?”

“No. You’re hot to me because you’re hot.”

“Whatever.”

“Way too much brain in your head.”

“Okay.”

“Stop being like that. I’m complimenting you. Can’t you just lie in my arms fucking delightfully for once?”

“I’m trapped in myself.”

“Meaning? What’s that mean?”

“I just live out comparisons whenever I’m with you. Look. Bronzed abs. Who the fuck is bronzed? Yet Tommy Michaels is bronzed. Okay. I’m not bronzed.”

“You sort of have abs.”

“That’s from being skinny, not from having worked out.”

“Same end result.”

“How are you so tanned? All year round? It’s almost like you’re ill. Have you got Addison’s disease? Have you checked?—like JFK.”

“I dunno. Someone in the family must’ve got with a sailor.”

“Do sailors have perma-tans? Isn’t that because of the job? On the quarterdeck, unmitigated sun above you? Climbing rigging?”

“I meant because they’re not from England so they might’ve had Spanish in them or Greek or something. Greeks are sailors.”

“My leg’s going numb—there. Greeks are sort of shipping magnates. I don’t know how much of that’s sailing.”

“But they are tanned.”

“Yes. Greeks are tanned. Have you done your Findmypast?”

“My genes?”

“Well yeah.”

“No. Have you?”

“Have I done your Find My Past?”

“Idiot. Have you done yours?”

“I feel like Blumenthal is quite predictable. Pogroms and so on. Mitteleuropa.”

“How come you’re Catholic then?”

“Personal choice.”

“Are your mum and dad fine with that?”

“They’re not religious.”

“Well. The point is, you could gym.”

“What? We’re jumping back to that?”

“I’m saying, to get jacked.”

“I do go to the gym. You don’t, Tommy, and you’re just blessed looking like that.”

“You look good too.”

“Look at you though. Athletic genes.”

“I do do boxing five times a week. So yeah.”

“Athletic sailor genes. And I lift and I still look nothing like that.”

“It’s diet. And cardio. And how much effort you actually put in on the day.”

“Yeah—but I just feel that there are some people who are born to it and some who patently aren’t. And it always seems to be religious people who aren’t born to it, as if there were a direct negative correlation between piety and a man’s muscle mass. Right?”

“I think Schwarzenegger is a Catholic.”

“Outlier.”

“You can talk like that and you can make everyone an outlier. That’s one way to do life. But that won’t change your situation. And anyway, I wouldn’t stay with you if I didn’t think you looked good. Obviously you do.”

“Yes but you like me in precisely the way I’m unattractive to myself, that is in the way people fancy effete Englishmen. For that wan dead violet-eyed look. TB-chic. Right? And you’re just natural himbo-goodlooking. Of which, disgustingly, I’m envious.”

“I’m not a “himbo”, Edward.”

“I’m just using that as a shorthand. Like “jock” or “twink”.”

“And does “himbo” not have a sort of insulting vibe to it?”

“Well it’s a portmanteau isn’t it, him and bimbo, and bimbo is from the Italian, bimbare, to bimb—”

“Whatever.”

“Now you’re whatevering me, Tommy?”

“Let go of me. When you speak quickly in an unthinking moment you say what’s more real to you, so. So you clearly think of me as dumb.”

“You’re not dumb.”

“Not intelligent, then.”

“Are we really going there? Does reading books equate to intelligence? No. You have raw intelligence. Far more than me in certain regards.”

“Certain regards, yeah. Like empathy, self-awareness.”

“Okay then.”

“Look, I dunno if I’m feeling dinner.”

“The booking’s an hour from now.”

“I know. But tonight. I’m in a bad mood. I think it’d be going through the motions.”

“The motions are there to be gone through, Christ, what? What are you saying?”

“I think I might just head to mine tonight, you get me? I just—I just feel we’d be in a better place if I had some time to do, I dunno, fuck all, go on CoD, yeah? Are we really in a position to be going to dinner?”

“Well, we’d need clothes first, but—”

“Emotionally.”

“I’m a chameleon. I can be happy.”

“Yeah. You are. My emotions are slower than yours. But it would be nice to see you tomorrow.”

III

“No, Edward.”

“Why not?”

“It looks stupid.”

“It’s Le Corbusier.”

“It’s a chair that looks like it’s out of a GP’s office. Chair someone might die or shit themselves in.”

“It cost me a grand.”

“Well, you can put it on The Saleroom.”

“I know you own this flat Tommy. But why can’t I help make it mine? It’s a collaboration. Neither of us has ownership over the other’s taste, I get that. But can we meet?”

“Yeah, but not if you’re buying the most unchic things ever made.”

“This is chic! It’s Le Corbusier! It couldn’t be more.”

“It’s just, it’s like something from eighty years ago.”

“It is something from eighty years ago.”

“Well there you go. I’m not an antiques person.”

“There isn’t anything inherently better about the present and in fact you’ll probably find that most people agree with me that the past is better.”

“Dying young, homophobia, all that.”

“Mozart, Tiepolo, Ronald Firbank, Lutyens. The pre-eminence of literature. Opera that the state doesn’t have to fund. Being able to own a flat.”

“I do own this flat.”

“Okay well it doesn’t count if you paid for this with a crypto bet.”

“Let’s make out. Come on.”

“It’s so romantic when you say it like you’re an American.”

“Let’s make out.”

“No Tommy.”

“Why no?”

“Because your beauty makes it impossible for me to consider defiling you? Something like that? I don’t know, do I? I don’t know why not. Maybe just terming it “making out”. Make out with me. Make out with me. Like a sorority girl you’ve gotten drunk. I’m your partner Tommy.”

“My boyfriend.”

“Yes, well.”

“You can’t even say that.”

“Boyfriend. Content?”

“Not really, no. Why would you hide from a word? Why are you trying to make our relationship into a copycat of a straight one? We have all these get-out-of-jail-frees, all this baggage reduction that gays’ privilege gets you, and here you are, making me into your wife.”

“Please. We have problems. Don’t we! We aren’t just external to problems. There are new, different, terrifying other problems. It isn’t a privilege. It’s just a different mode.”

“We’re talking about our life.”

“Dissecting. Feels like that, sometimes.”

“In what possible way?”

“Your forcing me to say “boyfriend”? You’re not a boy. You’re twenty-four. I’m thirty-four! I’d be dead as a Neanderthal by now. I’d literally be past the life expectancy.”

“I am a boy.”

“You own a flat.”

“It’s a mindset.”

“Owning a flat?”

“Being a boy, being young.”

“I’m joking.”

“Owning a flat could be a mindset too actually.”

“Please stop saying things.”

“Edward. Can I say one final thing? Before the kissing—”

“For god’s sake. What?”

“I hate your chair.”

IV

“No, I didn’t do it for that. For those reasons. Not because of your fears that you’re less attractive than I am, but that because of your fears you’ve become impossible to live with? As in, envy, paranoia, are unattractive qualities, which have pushed me out of my love for you. Which is my reason for having done it, if I need to have a reason in order to apologise.”

“Why are you speaking so formally to me right now Tommy?”

“Because it’s one of the only things that’ll get you to actually listen.”

“Well I don’t—”

“See Edward, because even as I speak to you you’re analysing the way I’m talking instead of what I’m saying. Why are you not fucking unhappy?”

“Are you really shouting at me when I’m the one who’s just been cheated on?”

“You’re not moved! You’re not crying!”

“Can you not see how this is a paradox.”

“I’m saying you should be sad that I’ve admitted this. The fact you don’t even care? Well it—”

“Well it what?”

“Well it makes me want to consider doing it again, if only to make you fucking feel something.”

“So, let me be clear, during the conversation we’re engaged in, in which you’ve just told me you’ve cheated on me, not with a rando but with one of my colleagues, you’re now telling me the way I’m reacting to you cheating is making you want to cheat on me again so that I react in the way you specify?”

“Yeah. Yes. Because I almost knew in the moment you wouldn’t care.”

“I do care.”

“You do care—but you pretend or don’t show that you do.”

“Okay, let me force out some tears. Look, I’m crying. I’m squeezing my tear ducts. Tears will come, look.”

“Please stop that. Please.”

“You wanted me crying, here we are.”

“Please stop doing things to your eyeballs, Edward.”

“It’s a manifested, a concretised version of what we’ve just been saying. You want me to cry. I’m not crying. So I will obey the great Tommy, and cry on command.”

“I wanted me cheating on you to bring us closer together.”

“You believed your cheating on me would bring us closer together? See what I mean about paradoxes? You’re mentally ill.”

“I’m not sure I believed it.”

“Then what then?”

“I’m saying I desired it.”

“I do not understand.”

“God can you just get your head out your arse? For someone so intelligent—. I’m saying that maybe a shock to the system would do us good, you’d show emotions, we’d be able to talk about your fears I’d leave you—which will never, ever happen, by the way. We’d talk about that and you’d get more comfortable with me simply existing and not be terrified there’s going to be a Tommy-sized hole in your life out of nowhere. Do you get me?”

“No, not really. No.”

“Just—God.”

“Well so here’s my take: you said you’ve been pushed out of your love for me. You say you cheated for that reason. Now you also say, a similar but different thing, that you’ve cheated because you essentially do love me and want to love me more. Now in neither of these scenarios is cheating an act of love. I sort of believe that you wanted to just cause some sort of lightning-strike fuck-the-world sort of crashing down of things, which might mean we’d reassess, reevaluate our relationship. But I’m supposed to believe you want to cheat on me again because I’m not visibly sad enough that your bizarre plan hasn’t worked? Rather, Occam’s Razor, I think you just want to shag him again.”

“Well, no, because I was thinking of someone else.”

V

“Hi. Joe?”

“Nice to meet you, Edward.”

“Haha, never know whether to go in for the handshake or the hug first time—”

“Yeah I know right.”

“Nice place.”

“You think so?”

“Well, yeah, I’ve never been here though, but I don’t quite know why because I actually used to live in the area with my ex.”

“Right into the deep end.”

“Sorry. Can you tell I haven’t dated in a while?”

“No, it’s funny. It’s cute.”

“So Joe you said you’re, what was it, industrial chemist?”

“Yeah exactly.”

“I love that shirt on you by the way.”

“Aw. Thanks.”

“So what does industrial chemist mean?”

“I do the ice cream flavours.”

“Just the flavours?”

“Oh. Yeah. Just the flavours. Someone else does texture.”

“I’d’ve thought they’d’ve been sort of, part and parcel, you know? Like if you edited the flavour component it might change the texture?”

“Well it’s all syrups, which are stabilised, so it doesn’t really, it doesn’t really matter to us.”

“I find that banana ice cream is underrated. Like, rare.”

“Yeah, banana’s not popular.”

“Yet people love eating bananas. Quintessential fruit. Coincidentally: my nickname.”

“Haha. Yeah.”

“I’ve also never seen watermelon ice cream. Is that just me? Is there such a thing?”

“Well, it’s that watermelon is actually not that flavourful. Not that distinct a flavour note really.”

“No? I think it is. I think it has that sweet, slightly vomity taste? It’s like if sick tasted amazing.”

“Hi gents, do you know what you’re thinking of ordering?”

“Oh, sorry, we haven’t even had a look.”

“No worries. I’ll give you a couple mins.”

“Sorry Joe. Talking about vomit when we’re about to eat.”

“It’s fine.”

“I guess it’s nice to speak to someone who has a real job, you know? “Industrial chemist.” That’s so utterly a job—a job job. My ex was a PT who did crypto on the side. Could you think of a more basic combo? It’s like, hello, it’s for you, Dubai calling. Right? So he took care of himself and did fake tans and such, not in a repulsive way but in a more like a tasteful sort of way. Took, I said, well, takes, he’s not dead, right. But can you imagine the convos we had to have? Oh, I have this client, he’s a bit delusional about how much he can bench. Oh, I’m going to a crypto conference to go and scam some more teenagers. Not literally that, but that adjacent. You know?”

“Yeah. Must’ve been hard.”

“Yeah, it was hard. It was like, here’s this person I’ve fallen in love with despite it all, someone so totally unalike me—perhaps like if you took a wax cast of me, he’d be the negative, the opposite, every single quality the opposite of mine. He hated anything more than a year old. Clothes. Furniture. He wanted a glass box for a flat. And I want someone who can appreciate the Victorians, you know?”

“Yeah. So do you know what you wanna order—?”

“Oh, sorry, haven’t had a chance to look. But so see, industrial chemistry is a breath of fucking—because we lived together, put our record collections together, metaphorically, neither of us owning records or a record player—and so I come home and daily get to hear about the travails of the local oldies at the David Lloyd gym. And if I should ever have complained—woe betide. Sorry. I’m going on.”

“It’s okay.”

“So have they ever done a custard ice cream? I feel like that’s a gap in the market.”

VI

“Thanks for having this coffee, Tommy.”

“Well of course.”

“It’s just that, perhaps you might feel the same, but it’s been a weird six months.”

“It has.”

“For various reasons.”

“Yes. For various reasons.”

“I’ve been dating. Not well. One of them called me Eddie.”

“Ah.”

“I presume you have too?”

“No, actually.”

“No?”

“No, I haven’t seen anyone.”

“Hm.”

“I do think about you.”

“I would’ve thought given that you were keen to see other guys, not in a getting with way but in a going out with way, that you might’ve been dating.”

“Maybe. I dunno. Some time by myself, single, not dating, I felt might be a good thing to do.”

“I get you.”

“Latte?”

“Oh mine thanks.”

“And here’s the espresso.”

“Cheers.”

“So well all of my dating has been unmitigated cringe. I mean. Am I out of practice? Is more expected of me because of my age compared to theirs?—they’ve all been twenty, twenty-two. How was your twenty-fifth by the way?”

“Nice thanks. Yeah, nice. It felt weird without you being there.”

“It felt weird not being there Tommy. I mean, that’s the funny thing about dates, birthdays—they’re like all these sort of appointments in your head to keep, only the person might be out of your life, or have passed away, or have been long forgotten and not in contact. Nevertheless. Still in the diary. Still up on the horizon, coming into view. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“So I wanted to see you because I wanted to have a difficult conversation.”

“Go on. You can be open with me.”

“Thank you. Well, so, it’s sort of—I don’t really know how to put it into words. I’ll try. I wondered if you would accept my apology, and perhaps offer me an apology, for parity, and that we could give it another go? I mean, literally try getting back together. Not immediately. Dating first. Not being ‘boyfriends’ straight off the bat.”

“I think we could. Yeah, I think we could try that. It would almost be romantic to try it blank slate.”

“Tabula rasa, yeah.”

“You are still a pretentious clown.”

“A learned clown. A scholarly clown.”

“A pretentious clown.”

“I probably am.”

“You said boyfriends.”

“I’m experiencing what they call “growth”.”

“It suits you.”

“Thank you. The moustache suits you.”

“Works in blond?”

“Works in blond. Doubly so. It’s like a Labrador, Aussie, Austin Butler kind of thing.”

“I’ll take it.”

VII

“So Tommy sent me an invitation to his wedding. His wedding with Justin, remember Justin, the guy he first cheated with? Justin.”

“Is his name Justin.”

“Yeah.”

“Just checking. Well Edward—are you gonna go?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t even seen him in person in over two years. There was some weird Zoom call babyshower thing we were both on. I thought his eyes might be looking at my tile on the Zoom. You know, you sort of see their eyes going diagonal and it’s clear they’re not looking at the person who’s speaking? But then, he could have been looking at himself. It was a real riddle. But I’m going to believe it was me, the whole time. So what does that say? And the invite?”

“Edward. Be honest. One hundred percent honest. Are you over him?”

“Can you truly get over someone?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Then no, no I doubt that I am.”

“So won’t going to his wedding be?”

“Difficult? Horrible? Yeah, maybe. Yeah.”

“Don’t go if you don’t want to.”

“It was mature of him to invite me, no?”

“I guess.”

“And I do want him to be happy. He’s a good person.”

“So are you.”

“In my own way—possibly. Not like Tommy is.”

“I think you’re right.”

“About?”

“Your not being over him quite yet.”

VIII

“I cannot even begin to fathom how much of a faff a divorce is.”

“Well. It’s not great.”

“Who gets the dog?”

“I dunno, we haven’t talked about Greta yet, Edward.”

“You should take her. Kidnap her.”

“Kidnap a dog? Can you do that?”

“In the sense of stealing her. Abduct?”

“That’s more for like, dictators or children, no?”

“Get the dog.”

“I do want her.”

“What’s your alternative? I’ll come with you Tommy. We can pretend I’m doing a Deliveroo or something. I’ll wear a balaclava. I’ll rush in, get the dog from him.”

“It’s a nice idea. It might have to stay an idea.”

“What’s your alternative? You chop her in half, King Solomon, half a dog each?”

“Is that what happened? I’m not chopping Greta in half.”

“No, it was a baby in fact, not a dog, and they didn’t bisect it in the end. I think one of them sort of screamed louder. You could try that.”

“I could. I love Greta but I sort of feel as if I want to totally cut my ties from that life.”

“Never leave a dog behind. Never. You can’t go to your grave having done that.”

“I’m leaving my whole life behind.”

“It was only two years. You’re going to recover. You’re not even thirty.”

“Maybe.”

“Let’s get drunk. Please. I’ll make boulevardiers. They’ll facilitate a DMC. You need that.”

“Fuck it. I do.”

“Hooray. I’m salivating.”

“Thanks for staying a friend, Edward.”

“For you, dear Thomas—anything.”

IX

“I am never moving here. Why would people move here?”

“I think they must like it. That must be it.”

“How? How could they possibly?”

“Edward, isn’t that your ex?”

“What? Where?”

“There. Look. On the other platform.”

“Oh my god. It is. Tommy! Oi! Tommy!”

“He can’t hear you.”

“Fuck. It’s been years. We completely fell out of touch.”

“He looks good.”

“He’s always going to look good, I’m afraid.”

“You do too.”

“I am not blessed with youth.”

“You were.”

“I was. You only figure out what good being young’s for when you no longer are. It’s a real fucking shame.”

“What do you think he’s doing here?”

“What do I think he’s doing in Hastings? He’s gay. Isn’t that QED? The seaside attracts us. We’re like seagulls.”

“Want to go over?”

“To see Tommy?”

“Yeah. Seeing that our train’s delayed, why not?”

“Um.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re never nervous. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know if I want to bring all that up again. It felt like a closed door.”

“It still is. He hasn’t seen you.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, who’s that?”

“Whoever he is, he’s hot.”

“I haven’t seen him on Tommy’s Insta.”

“He doesn’t post. I don’t even know if he uses it.”

“New boyfriend?”

“Well, they’re kissing now. That seems pretty logical.”

“I can’t tell with gays.”

“...”

“They’ve now stopped.”

“I know Kirsty, thanks. I have eyes.”

“He’s looking at us. Tommy’s looking. Edward. He sees you. He’s not saying anything.”

“I’m not saying anything either.”

“Why isn’t he reacting?”

“Why aren’t I?”

“Want to go over?”

“I don’t think I do. No. I don’t think I do. It’s best we stay where we are. That’s best, I think.”

Share

Please share this post if you liked it.

Summer, a scorcher, …

Read more

Read more

It’s £3.50 (c. $4.68) to become a paid sub…

Read more

Read more

“Therefore talking about our rela…

Read more

Read more

But there were limitations. It felt too m…

Read more

I

It looked a lot of stones left out in the rain.

On a hill, on an island,

a symbol of the affront of failure,

less architecture than the ongoing defiance of conquered rebellion.

Aldhelm had that sort of heroic personality you come across rarely in the character of real people: heroism that joined a willingness for self-sacrifice

with an incredulity at the th…

Read more

She said, “You have to read this post, I absolutely loved it. It's all about the mechanics of relationship building.”

“Sounds dreamy,” said Rose.

“No but it is actually so well written.”

“Oh yeah?” said Rose, at her phone.

It would be a few days before it properly pressed into Rose's inner checklist. Th…

Read more

Read more

There was a surplus of material for her fr…

Read more

“Yeah,” Christopher said.

“I'm also gay,” Justin said.

“Wow.”

“This is terrifying.”

“I've never told anyone.”

“Neither.”

So aged seventeen they'd found each other—behind hay bales at the back of the Four Villages cider festival, both drunk, both earnest. June—frilled hollyhocks pink and alive, and eve…

Read more

Restraining orders don't have to apply in emergencies. So John Jones was able, having seen her last eight years before, to press his surgeon's tools into his daughter Amy. Simply no one else was free.

She must've been brought down the loose, salted slope to the hospital. They would've driven in an orderly dash, as ever, a rushed procession. Snow going so…

Read more