'It's only half-ten,' Barry says. 'Let's get another one in.'

'You can if you want. I'm going back.' I don't want to have a drink with someone called T-Bone, but I get the feeling that this is exactly what Barry would like to do. I get the feeling that having a drink with someone called T-Bone could be the high point of Barry's decade. 'I don't want to muck your evening up. I just don't feel like staying.'

'Not even for half an hour?'

'Not really.'

'Hold on a minute, then. I've got to take a p.i.s.s.'

'Me too,' d.i.c.k says.

When they're gone, I get out quickly, and hail a black cab. It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.

When I get home (twenty quid, Putney to Crouch End, and no tip) I make myself a cup of tea, plug in the headphones, and plow through every angry song about women by Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello I own, and when I've got through those, I stick on a Neil Young live alb.u.m until I have a head ringing with feedback, and when I've finished with Neil Young I go to bed and stare at the ceiling, which is no longer the dreamy, neutral activity it once was. It was a joke, wasn't it, all that Marie stuff? I was kidding myself that there was something I could go on to, an easy, seamless transition to be made. I can see that now. I can see everything once it's already happened - I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

I get to work late, and d.i.c.k has already taken a message from Liz. I'm to ring her at work, urgently. I have no intention of ringing her at work. She wants to cancel our drink this evening, and I know why, and I'm not going to let her. She'll have to cancel to my face.

I get d.i.c.k to ring her back and tell her that he'd forgotten I wouldn't be in all day - I've gone to a record fair in Colchester and I'm coming back specially for a date this evening. No, d.i.c.k doesn't have a number. No, d.i.c.k doesn't think I'll be ringing the shop. I don't answer the phone for the rest of the day, just in case she tries to catch me out.

We've arranged to meet in Camden, in a quiet Youngs pub on Parkway. I'm early, but I've got a Time Out Time Out with me, so I sit in a corner with my pint and some cashews and work out which films I'd see if I had anyone to go with. with me, so I sit in a corner with my pint and some cashews and work out which films I'd see if I had anyone to go with.

The date with Liz doesn't take long. I see her stomping toward my table - she's nice, Liz, but she's huge, and when she's angry, like she is now, she's pretty scary - and I try a smile, but I can see it's not going to work, because she's too far gone to be brought back like that.

'You're a f.u.c.king a.r.s.ehole, Rob,' she says, and then she turns around and walks out, and the people at the next table stare at me. I blush, stare at the Time Out Time Out and take a big pull on my pint in the hope that the gla.s.s will obscure my reddening face. and take a big pull on my pint in the hope that the gla.s.s will obscure my reddening face.

She's right, of course. I am a f.u.c.king a.r.s.ehole.

Seven

For a couple of years, at the end of the eighties, I was a DJ at a club in Kentish Town, and it was there I met Laura. It wasn't much of a club, just a room above a pub, really, but for a six-month period it was popular with a certain London crowd - the almost fashionable, right-on, black 501s-and-DMs-crowd that used to move in herds from the market to the Town and Country to Dingwalls to the Electric Ballroom to the Camden Plaza. I was a good DJ, I think. At any rate, people seemed happy, they danced, stayed late, asked me where they could buy some of the records I played, and came back week after week. We called it the Groucho Club, because of Groucho Marx's thing about not wanting to join any club that would have him as a member; later on we found out that there was another Groucho Club somewhere in the West End, but n.o.body seemed to get confused about which was which. (Top five floor-fillers at the Groucho, incidentally: 'It's a Good Feeling' by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles; 'No Blow No Show' by Bobby Bland; 'Mr. Big Stuff' by Jean Knight; 'The Love You Save' by the Jackson Five; 'The Ghetto' by Donny Hathaway.) And I loved, loved doing it. To look down on a roomful of heads all bobbing away to the music you have chosen is an uplifting thing, and for that six-month period when the club was popular, I was as happy as I have ever been. It was the only time I have ever really had a sense of momentum, although later I could see that it was a false momentum, because it didn't belong to me at all, but to the music: anyone playing his favorite dance records very loud in a crowded place, to people who had paid to hear them, would have felt exactly the same thing. Dance music, after all, is supposed to have momentum - I just got confused.

Anyway, I met Laura right in the middle of that period, in the summer of '87. She reckons she had been to the club three or four times before I noticed her, and that could well be right - she's small, and skinny, and pretty, in a sort of Sheena Easton pre-Hollywood makeover way (although she looked tougher than Sheena Easton with her radical lawyer spiky hair and her boots and her scary pale blue eyes), but there were prettier women there, and when you're looking on in that idle kind of way, it's the prettiest ones you look at. So, on this third or fourth time, she came up to my little rostrum thing and spoke to me, and I liked her straightaway: she asked me to play a record that I really loved ('Got to Get You off My Mind' by Solomon Burke, if anyone cares), but which had cleared the floor whenever I'd tried it.

'Were you here when I played it before?'

'Yeah.'

'Well, you saw what happened. They were all about to go home.'

It's a three-minute single, and I'd had to take it off after about a minute and a half. I played 'Holiday' by Madonna instead; I used modern stuff every now and again, at times of crisis, just like people who believe in homeopathy have to use conventional medicine sometimes, even though they disapprove of it.

'They won't this time.'

'How do you know that?'

'Because I brought half of this lot here, and I'll make sure they dance.'

So I played it, and sure enough Laura and her mates flooded the dance floor, but one by one they all drifted off again, shaking their heads and laughing. It is a hard song to dance to; it's a mid-tempo R&B thing, and the intro sort of stops and starts. Laura stuck with it, and though I wanted to see whether she'd struggle gamely through to the end, I got nervous when people weren't dancing, so I put 'The Love You Save' on quick.

She wouldn't dance to the Jackson Five, and she marched over to me, but she was grinning and said she wouldn't ask again. She just wanted to know where she could buy the record. I said if she came next week I'd have a tape for her, and she looked really pleased.

I spent hours putting that ca.s.sette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter - there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one, because . . . to be honest, because I hadn't met anyone as promising as Laura since I'd started the DJ-ing, and meeting promising women was partly what the DJ-ing was supposed to be about. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got to Get You off My Mind,' but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and . . . oh, there are loads of rules.

Anyway, I worked and worked at this one, and I've still got a couple of early demons knocking around the flat, prototype tapes I changed my mind about when I was checking them through. And on Friday night, club night, I produced it from my jacket pocket when she came over to me, and we went on from there. It was a good beginning.

Laura was, is, a lawyer, although when I met her she was a different kind of lawyer from the one she is now: then, she worked for a legal aid firm (hence, I guess, the clubbing and the black leather motorcycle jacket). Now, she works for a City law firm (hence, I guess, the restaurants and the expensive suits and the disappearance of the spiky haircut and a previously unrevealed taste for weary sarcasm) not because she underwent any kind of political conversion, but because she was made redundant and couldn't find any legal aid work. She had to take a job that paid about forty-five grand a year because she couldn't find one that paid under twenty; she said that this was all you need to know about Thatcherism, and I suppose she had a point. She changed when she got the new job. She was always intense, but, before, the intensity had somewhere to go: she could worry about tenants' rights, and slum landlords, and kids living in places without running water. Now she's just intense about work work - how much she has, the pressure she's under, how she's doing, what the partners think of her, that kind of stuff. And when she's not being intense about work, she's being intense about why she shouldn't be intense about work, or this kind of work, anyway. - how much she has, the pressure she's under, how she's doing, what the partners think of her, that kind of stuff. And when she's not being intense about work, she's being intense about why she shouldn't be intense about work, or this kind of work, anyway.

Sometimes - not so often recently - I could do something or say something that allowed her to escape from herself, and that's when we worked best; she complains frequently about my 'relentless triviality,' but it has its uses.

I never had any wild crush on her, and that used to worry me about the long-term future: I used to think - and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do - that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have a look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.

With Laura, I changed my mind about that whole process for a while. There weren't any sleepless nights or losses of appet.i.te or agonizing waits for the phone to ring for either of us. But we just carried on regardless, anyway, and, because there was no steam to lose, we never had to have that look around to see what we'd got, because what we'd got was the same as what we'd always had. She didn't make me miserable, or anxious, or ill at ease, and when we went to bed I didn't panic and let myself down, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

We went out a lot, and she came to the club every week, and when she lost the lease on her flat in Archway she moved in, and everything was good, and stayed that way for years and years. If I was being obtuse, I'd say that money changed everything: when she switched jobs, she suddenly had loads, and when I lost the club work, and the recession seemed to make the shop suddenly invisible to pa.s.sers-by, I had none. Of course things like that complicate life, and there are all kinds of readjustments to think about, battles to fight and lines to draw. But really, it wasn't the money. It was me. Like Liz said, I'm an a.r.s.ehole.

The night before Liz and I were supposed to have a drink in Camden, Liz and Laura met up somewhere for something to eat, and Liz had a go at Laura about Ian, and Laura wasn't planning on saying anything in her own defense, because that would have meant a.s.saulting me, and she has a powerful and sometimes ill-advised sense of loyalty. (I, for example, would not have been able to restrain myself.) But Liz pushed it too far, and Laura snapped, and all these things about me poured out in a torrent, and then they both cried, and Liz apologized between fifty and one hundred times for speaking out of turn. So the following day Liz snapped, tried to phone me and then marched into the pub and called me names. I don't know any of this for sure, of course. I have had no contact at all with Laura and only a brief and unhappy meeting with Liz. But, even so, one does not need a sophisticated understanding of the characters in question to guess this much.

I do not know what, precisely, Laura said, but she would have revealed at least two, maybe even all four, of the following pieces of information:

1) That I slept with somebody else while she was pregnant.

2) That my affair contributed directly to her terminating the pregnancy.

3) That, after her abortion, I borrowed a large sum of money from her and have not yet repaid any of it.

4) That, shortly before she left, I told her I was unhappy in the relationship, and I was kind of sort of maybe looking around for someone else.

Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circ.u.mstances? Not really, unless any circ.u.mstances (in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the worst four things that you have done to your partner, even if - especially if - your partner doesn't know about them. Don't dress these things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? OK, so who's the a.r.s.ehole now?

Eight

'Where the f.u.c.k have you been?' I ask Barry when he turns up for work on Sat.u.r.day morning. I haven't seen him since we went to Marie's gig at the White Lion - no phone calls, no apologies, nothing.

'Where the f.u.c.k have I been? Where the f.u.c.k have I been? G.o.d, you're an a.r.s.ehole,' Barry says by way of an explanation. 'I'm sorry, Rob. I know things aren't going so well for you and you have problems and stuff, but, you know. We spent f.u.c.king hours looking for you the other night.'

'Hours? More than one hour? At least two? I left at half-ten, so you abandoned the search at half-twelve, right? You must have walked from Putney to Wapping.'

'Don't be a smarta.r.s.e.'

One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, somebody will be able to refer to me without using the word a.r.s.e a.r.s.e somewhere in the sentence. somewhere in the sentence.

'OK, sorry. But I'll bet you looked for ten minutes, and then had a drink with Marie and thingy. T-Bone.'

I hate calling him T-Bone. It sets my teeth on edge, like when you have to ask for a Big Heap Buffalo Billburger, when all you want is a quarter-pounder, or a Just Like Mom Used to Make, when all you want is a piece of apple pie.

'That's not the point.'

'Did you have a good time?'

'It was great. T-Bone's played on two Guy Clark alb.u.ms and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore alb.u.m.'

'Far out.'

'Oh, f.u.c.k off.'

I'm glad it's Sat.u.r.day because we're reasonably busy, and Barry and I don't have to find much to say to each other. When d.i.c.k's making a cup of coffee and I'm looking for an old Shirley Brown single in the stockroom, he tells me that T-Bone's played on two Guy Clark alb.u.ms and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore alb.u.m.

'And do you know what? He's a really nice guy,' he adds, astonished that someone who has reached these dizzying heights is capable of exchanging a few civil words in a pub. But that's about it as far as staff interaction goes. There are too many other people to talk to.

Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just have have to buy a record on a Sat.u.r.day, even if there's nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable. to buy a record on a Sat.u.r.day, even if there's nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable.

You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head ('If I don't find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do'), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something they don't really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a p.r.i.c.kly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.

The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield wipers when they're driving home from work. Sometimes something ba.n.a.l and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. But sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. Sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a s.n.a.t.c.h of a song they haven't heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed dreamed a record, the whole thing, melody, t.i.tle, and artist. And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, 'Happy Go Lucky Girl' by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental. a record, the whole thing, melody, t.i.tle, and artist. And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, 'Happy Go Lucky Girl' by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental.

You can really see what d.i.c.k and Barry are for on Sat.u.r.days. d.i.c.k is as patient and as enthusiastic and as gentle as a primary-school teacher: he sells people records they didn't know they wanted because he knows intuitively what they should buy. He chats, then puts something on the record deck, and soon they're handing over fivers almost distractedly as if that's what they'd come in for in the first place. Barry, meanwhile, simply bulldozes customers into submission. He rubbishes them because they don't own the first Jesus and Mary Chain alb.u.m, and they buy it, and he laughs at them because they don't own Blonde on Blonde, Blonde on Blonde, so they buy that, and he explodes in disbelief when they tell him that they have never heard of Ann Peebles, and then they buy something of hers, too. At around four o'clock most Sat.u.r.day afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and it's going OK, maybe because I'm proud of us, of the way that, though our talents are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage. so they buy that, and he explodes in disbelief when they tell him that they have never heard of Ann Peebles, and then they buy something of hers, too. At around four o'clock most Sat.u.r.day afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and it's going OK, maybe because I'm proud of us, of the way that, though our talents are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage.

So when I come to close the shop, and we're getting ready to go out for a drink as we do every Sat.u.r.day, we are all happy together again; we have a fund of goodwill which we will spend over the next few empty days, and which will have completely run out by Friday lunchtime. We are so happy, in fact, that between throwing the customers out and leaving for the day, we list our top five Elvis Costello songs (I go for 'Alison,' 'Little Triggers,' 'Man Out of Time,' 'King Horse,' and a bootleg Merseybeat-style version of 'Everyday I Write the Book' I've got on a bootleg tape somewhere, the obscurity of the last cleverly counteracting the obviousness of the first, I thought, and thus preempting scorn from Barry) and, after the sulks and rows of the last week, it feels good to think about things like this again.

But when we walk out of the shop, Laura's waiting there for me, leaning against the strip of wall that separates us from the shoe shop next door, and I remember that it's not supposed to be a feel-good period of my life.

Nine

The money is easy to explain: she had it, I didn't, and she wanted to give it to me. This was when she'd been in the new job a few months and her salary was starting to pile up in the bank a bit. She lent me five grand; if she hadn't, I would have gone under. I have never paid her back because I've never been able to, and the fact that she's moved out and is seeing somebody else doesn't make me five grand richer. The other day on the phone, when I gave her a hard time and told her she'd f.u.c.ked my life up, she said something about the money, something about whether I'd start paying her back in installments, and I said I'd pay her back at a pound a week for the next hundred years. That's when she hung up.

So that's the money. The stuff I told her about being unhappy in the relationship, about half looking around for someone else: she pushed me into saying it. She tricked tricked me into saying it. That sounds feeble, but she did. We were having a state-of-the-nation conversation and she said, quite matter-of-factly, that we were in a pretty unhappy phase at the moment, and I agreed; she asked whether I ever thought about meeting somebody else, and I denied it, and she laughed, and said that people in our position were always thinking about meeting somebody else. So I asked if she was always thinking about meeting somebody else, and she said of course, so I admitted that I did daydream about it sometimes. At the time I thought it was a let's-be-grown-up-about-life's-imperfectability sort of conversation, an abstract, adult a.n.a.lysis; now I see that we were really talking about her and Ian, and that she suckered me into absolving her. It was a sneaky lawyer's trick, and I fell for it, because she's much smarter than me. me into saying it. That sounds feeble, but she did. We were having a state-of-the-nation conversation and she said, quite matter-of-factly, that we were in a pretty unhappy phase at the moment, and I agreed; she asked whether I ever thought about meeting somebody else, and I denied it, and she laughed, and said that people in our position were always thinking about meeting somebody else. So I asked if she was always thinking about meeting somebody else, and she said of course, so I admitted that I did daydream about it sometimes. At the time I thought it was a let's-be-grown-up-about-life's-imperfectability sort of conversation, an abstract, adult a.n.a.lysis; now I see that we were really talking about her and Ian, and that she suckered me into absolving her. It was a sneaky lawyer's trick, and I fell for it, because she's much smarter than me.

I didn't know she was pregnant, of course I didn't. She hadn't told me because she knew I was seeing somebody else. (She knew I was seeing somebody else because I'd told her. We thought we were being grown-up, but we were being preposterously naive, childish even, to think that one or the other of us could get up to no good, and own up to the misdemeanor, while we were living together.) I didn't find out until ages afterward: we were going through a good period and I made some joke about having kids and she burst into tears. So I made her tell me what it was all about, and she did, after which I had a brief and ill-advised bout of noisy self-righteousness (the usual stuff - my child, too, what right did she have, blah blah) before her disbelief and contempt shut me up.

'You didn't look a very good long-term bet at the time,' she said. 'I didn't like you very much, either. I didn't want to have a baby by you. I didn't want to think about some awful visiting-rights relationship that stretched way on into the future. And I didn't want to be a single mother. It wasn't a very hard decision to make. There wasn't any point in consulting you about it.'

These were all fair points. In fact, if I'd got pregnant by me at the time, I would have had an abortion for exactly the same reasons. I couldn't think of anything to say.

Later on the same evening, after I'd rethought the whole pregnancy thing using the new information I had at my disposal, I asked her why she had stuck with it.

She thought for a long time.

'Because I'd never stuck at anything before, and I'd made a promise to myself when we started seeing each other that I'd make it through at least one bad patch, just to see what happened. So I did. And you were so pathetically sorry about that idiotic Rosie woman . . . ,' - Rosie, the four-bonk, simultaneous o.r.g.a.s.m, pain-in-the-a.r.s.e girl, the girl I was seeing when Laura was pregnant - ' . . . that you were very nice to me for quite a long time, and that was just what I needed. We go quite deep, Rob, if only because we've been together a reasonable length of time. And I didn't want to knock it all over and start again unless I really had to. So.'

And why had I stuck with it? Not for reasons as n.o.ble and as adult as that. (Is there anything more adult than sticking with a relationship that's falling apart in the hope that you can put it right? I've never done that in my life.) I stuck with it because, suddenly, right at the end of the Rosie thing, I found myself really attracted to Laura again; it was like I needed Rosie to spice Laura up a bit. And I thought I'd blown it (I didn't know then that she was experimenting with stoicism). I could see her losing interest in me, so I worked like mad to get that interest back, and when I got it back, I lost interest in her all over again. That sort of thing happens to me a lot, I find. I don't know how to sort it out. And that more or less brings us up to date. When the whole sorry tale comes out in a great big lump like that, even the most shortsighted jerk, even the most self-deluding and self-pitying of jilted, wounded lovers can see that there is some cause and effect going on here, that abortions and Rosie and Ian and money all belong to, deserve deserve each other. each other.

d.i.c.k and Barry ask us if we want to go with them to the pub for a quick one, but it's hard to imagine us all sitting round a table laughing about the customer who confused Albert King with Albert Collins ('He didn't even twig when he was looking at the record for scratches and he saw the Stax label,' Barry told us, shaking his head at the previously unsuspected depths of human ignorance), and I politely decline. I presume that we're going back to the flat, so I walk toward the bus stop, but Laura tugs me on the arm and wheels around to look for a cab.

'I'll pay. It wouldn't be much fun on the twenty-nine, would it?'

Fair point. The conversation we need to have is best conducted without a conductor - and without dogs, kids, and fat people with huge John Lewis bags.

We're pretty quiet in the cab. It's only a ten-minute ride from the Seven Sisters Road to Crouch End, but the journey is so uncomfortable and intense and unhappy that I feel I'll remember it for the rest of my life. It's raining, and the fluorescent lights make patterns on our faces; the taxi driver asks us if we've had a good day, and we grunt, and he slams the part.i.tion shut behind him. Laura stares out of the window, and I sneak the odd look at her, trying to see if the last week has made any difference in her face. She's had her hair cut, same as usual, very short, sixties short, like Mia Farrow, except - and I'm not just being creepy - she's better suited to this sort of cut than Mia. It's because her hair is so dark, nearly black, that when it's short her eyes seem to take up most of her face. She's not wearing any makeup, and I reckon this is for my benefit. It's an easy way of showing me that she's careworn, distracted, too miserable for fripperies. There's a nice symmetry here: when I gave her that tape with the Solomon Burke song on it, all those years ago, she was wearing loads of makeup, much more than she was used to wearing, and much more than she had worn the previous week, and I knew, or hoped, that this was for my benefit, too. So you get loads at the beginning, to show that things are good, positive, exciting, and none at the end, to show that things are desperate. Neat, eh?

(But later, just as we're turning the corner into my road, and I'm beginning to panic about the pain and difficulty of the impending conversation, I see a woman on her own, Sat.u.r.day-night-smart, off to meet somebody somewhere, friends, or a lover. And when I was living with Laura, I missed . . . what? Maybe I missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab, going out of thier way, going out of thier way, to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, maybe wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when I was younger, the knowledge that I was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me feel pathetically grateful. When you're with someone permanently, you don't get that: if Laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. And when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn't, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me. Anyway, all this is by way of saying that the woman I saw out of the cab window inspired me and consoled me, momentarily: maybe I am not too old to provoke a trip from one part of London to another, and if I ever do have another date, and I arrange to meet that date in, say, Islington, and she has to come all the way from Stoke Newington, a journey of some three to four miles, I will thank her from the bottom of my wretched thirty-five-year-old heart.) to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, maybe wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when I was younger, the knowledge that I was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me feel pathetically grateful. When you're with someone permanently, you don't get that: if Laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. And when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn't, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me. Anyway, all this is by way of saying that the woman I saw out of the cab window inspired me and consoled me, momentarily: maybe I am not too old to provoke a trip from one part of London to another, and if I ever do have another date, and I arrange to meet that date in, say, Islington, and she has to come all the way from Stoke Newington, a journey of some three to four miles, I will thank her from the bottom of my wretched thirty-five-year-old heart.) Laura pays the cabbie and I unlock the front door, put the timer light on, and usher her inside. She stops and goes through the post on the windowsill, just through force of habit, I guess, but of course she gets herself in difficulties immediately: as she's shuffling through the envelopes, she comes across Ian's TV license reminder, and she hesitates, just for a second, but long enough to remove any last remaining trace of doubt from my mind, and I feel sick.