‘Then I must be very unhappy,’ laughed Simon. Ann mouthed the words ‘big house’ to Tonia, who frowned, confused.

‘That life isn’t any more simple than ours, it’s complicated in other ways.’ This was Kate.

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Yes. Anyway, don’t you think there’s something equivocal, to use your word, about being undead? You’re neither one thing nor the other. Like a bat.’

Ann shuddered. ‘I hate bats. They stink.’

‘Have you ever been to Sydney?’ Simon asked. ‘The flying foxes in the Botanic Gardens are extraordinary. They wheel around in massive flocks at dusk. And they absolutely pong.’

‘Ann’s from Sydney,’ I said, as she didn’t.

‘Really? You don’t sound it.’

‘The thing about vampires is that you are technically not alive, even though you can move about and kill people.’

‘You’re undead!’ said Tonia, ‘that’s why you’re called undead.’ She had kept pace with me on the wine front.

‘Isn’t it really limbo, or a kind of murderous purgatory, that you’re in?’

‘Purgatory to me,’ said Andy, seizing the chance to get off genre, ‘is last period Year 9 Geography. Bloody interminable.’

‘Mine is when the children are ill,’ Simon said, somewhat surprisingly. ‘I hate that. And they whine.’

‘Rewrites for Alan Tranter,’ I said, ‘thank Christ I’ve been spared that.’

‘Not being able to help a client,’ said Kate, smiling at me annoyingly. And then she said to Ann as if progressing naturally on, ‘Whatever happened to that man who was following you? Did he go away?’

My chair trumpeted on the wooden floor as I stood to clear the plates. They had already been cleared. I sat back down again with a thud. Everyone was watching me.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Sorry. Ann?’

She just looked at me.

‘Sorry, go ahead. Speak.’

Somebody else started talking, I don’t remember who, only that the moment was saved and Ann muttered a sentence or two about it not really being an issue any more. Simon examined something in his coffee cup, dubbed it with a finger and discreetly wiped the finger on his napkin. Later I unfolded it and had a look. It was a small black smear, soft, unlike a coffee ground, which had once perhaps been an ant. I wondered how he had spotted it, so shiny and small and dark in the dark coffee. Perhaps he had felt it on his lip.

Rain slid silvery down the windows. Ann put on one of the classical CDs that only ever emerged when we had guests: dark and spare piano solos, full of mystery. I couldn’t leave the earlier conversation alone. What can I say? In my defence, I am a berk.

‘It might be more physically demanding but I just don’t see how living on the land, in that pioneer delusion some people have, is complicated. There’s nothing to negotiate apart from insects and malnutrition. In an overcrowded city, with dozens of different cultural and economic scales … ‘ God, Kate annoyed me then, her silence after I trailed off.

‘Are you from London?’ Tonia asked her.

‘And all those hippies who think it’s such a great idea to eat bread made from pea straw and sleep on sheep dung truly are ridiculous. Why ignore the industrial revolution, what earthly reason is there for living in those conditions if you don’t have to? It’s misogyny, nothing else.’ Ann opened her mouth but I already knew what she was going to say. ‘And don’t give me that eco-bullshit, you can live carbon neutral without sacrificing technology.’ She shut it again.

‘I grew up on a commune,’ said Kate. This statement was an opportunity for laughter that I managed to restrain. Of course, a commune.

‘The damp Scotch kind?’ (Orwell observes, rightly, that the Scots can’t stand it if you refer to them as Scotch. Kate didn’t flinch, and good for her.)

‘Afraid so.’ Did she have an accent? On the whole I thought not. London or Simon had knocked it out of her. Now even I could sense the discomfort around the table. What were the others thinking? Child abuse? Penury? Rain falling on a neglected, rickets-ridden baby Kate, her black hair crawling with lice?

‘Simple or complicated?’

‘Those distinctions aren’t really relevant.’

‘You see, needlessly complicated! Sorry, but it seems to me absolutely typical of hippies to say one thing and do another, just like they’re always crying poor and secretly amassing huge tracts of land to starve their sheep on.’

These weren’t my exact words of course but that was the sentiment, and whatever I did say was no less charming. At the other end of the table Simon asked Andy for his expert opinion on the rugby. He had been treating him with embarrassing deference ever since learning that Andy had a ‘real job’. Wait till he got hold of Tonia working at Holloway; she already had him laughing extra hard at her jokes.

‘What was it like?’ Ann asked Kate.

‘Well, it was all I knew.’ She looked at me. ‘And yes, a lot of it was misguided. There was a fair amount of mandolin playing and too many collective meetings. It was hard work, my God! But no cynicism.’

I had been put in my place. ‘Not for you now though.’

‘It broke up.’

‘But would you?’

A tiny shake of her head. ‘No.’

‘Kate, that’s not strictly true.’ Simon squeezed her hand.

‘Simon rescued me. When I was fifteen. I’d snuck off with a mate to the pub down the road, we used to stand in the doorway to watch TV. When I was small I thought the soap operas, Coronation Street and things like that, were documentaries. There was a new manager, he didn’t know about the commune and he pointed to the ‘No Dogs, No Travellers’ sign and tried to kick us out. My friend started shouting at him, and he called the police—’

‘It was much more exciting than Coronation Street,’ said Simon. I wasn’t sure I liked this meet-cute anecdote, or him in his role of knight on white steed.

‘Then my friend went berserk and smashed some glasses and Simon took her outside to calm her down.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘Having a break from London, where I’d got my heart broken. Looking for truth in the Highland air. Day job,’ he said, ‘while writing the meaningful personal film of all time.’ He laughed. ‘We won’t make that mistake again, will we, Tom? Older and wiser.’

My exhalation of acknowledgement was non-committal. Older! Was anybody going to comment on the fact that she was fifteen when they met? Was anybody else revolted by this? That photograph on his study wall … she was a child.

Kate laughed, ‘And he saw my greasy hair and my jumper with bits of dirt clinging to it and thought, I’m in love.’

‘That was before I took her home to the tepee. I reconsidered then but it was too late.’

‘We moved to London together and never looked back.’

How old was Kate now? I wondered, but couldn’t find a way to ask that wouldn’t be obviously nosy. I had prodded enough. The stray grey hairs, her squaw-like bearing, the strange completeness of her, made her seem perhaps older than she was. Perhaps the poise had been developed to overcome nervousness, and inside she was an ever-unravelling ball of lanolin-coated homespun wool. After coffee we repaired to the sofas, where Ann quizzed Kate about baby inoculations or some such hoo-ha and Tonia sat quiet, on the outer. Titus and Ruby-Lou, bored from watching television up in my study, came down and began harassing their parents. ‘When can we go home?’ ‘I’m bored.’ ‘I’m hungry.’ ‘Is there any juice?’ Tonia’s eyes saucered: this was the future?

Ann stared at her friend while Kate and Simon performed the ‘we really must be going’ ritual: her look meant ‘stick around’. It was hard not to compare the three women. I’m sure Simon and Andy did it too – skinny Tonia with her soft cloud of black hair, Ann’s tall, curved profile as she and Kate had a whispered conversation in the doorway, the pale orange light catching in Kate’s tawny eyes. One goodbye was enough – I can’t bear that faffing in doorways that goes on – and I banished myself to the kitchen and the dishes. Andy sat at the table flicking companionably through the Sunday supplements. When the front door closed I felt palpable relief.

‘Oh my God you’re so right!’ Ann said from the hallway. They came in. ‘Tonia reckons Kate looks like Bridget.’

‘Bridget who?’

‘Your ex.’ The idea amused Ann. Like all women she loved a pop psychology conspiracy.

‘Kate? She looks nothing like her.’

‘There’s something in her manner.’

‘She’s got a sort of watchful energy.’ Tonia picked up a random red wine glass that was waiting to be washed, and gestured with it. Her eyes were drifting. ‘And the way she says certain words.’

‘Really?’ This was a subtle, probably unconscious move by Tonia to establish Kate as the enemy and herself as Ann’s closest friend.

Suddenly Ann banged the chopping board down on the bench. We all jumped. ‘God why did you talk such shit about hippies, Tom? To sabotage the chances of him giving you a job.’

‘Good of you to ask the question if you already knew the answer.’

Apparently I was scuppering my shot at a regular writing gig because I thought I was too good for it (untrue) and, worse, I had directed the blow not at myself but at the Devil’s (yes) innocent (maybe) wife.

‘Guys, guys, can it.’

‘I’m sorry, but what is up with those children’s names?’

‘Of course the key to good risotto is the parmigiano reggiano.’

Tonia rolled her ‘r’s in the exaggerated Italian way that Simon spoke. This was a direct quote from him and I laughed along cruelly, despite having my own opinions about the key to good risotto, which doubtless would sound equally wanky if aired.

‘How old do you think she is?’ I asked, feeling it was safe.

‘Impossible to tell. A good deal younger than him clearly – cradle-snatcher.’

‘Yes, that is weird. I mean, what is it with fifteen-year-old girls? I was a nightmare at fifteen. Andy always says they’re terrifying, I mean, you can’t imagine finding one of your students attractive can you?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘He must have been one of those men who couldn’t get a girlfriend his own age.’

‘What’s his writing like?’

‘Exquisitely constructed.’

‘Oh shut up, Tom. Just shut up.’

It had been a mistake, the whole stupid lunch. She should never have tried to put these people together. Ann went into the bathroom and emerged some minutes later with red eyes.

I felt lonely at the thought of Tonia and Andy leaving and was flooded with gratitude, all over again, towards Ann for being pregnant, for filling our home with new life. We loved to lie in bed feeling the baby move under our hands, underneath Ann’s warm skin. That cliché – I can’t imagine my life without you – is bullshit. Of course you can imagine it. A poor, grey rag of a thing. Silence at the breakfast table and nobody to share the joke. Hollowness on waking. Sleeping at the wrong times. Uncoupled from the regular swing and tick of time. Doubled over in the supermarket, choking for breath by the freezer section, waving offers of help away, unable to meet their eyes. The shopping list in your hand not because there’s so much to buy but because you can’t hold anything in your brain. Buying her favourite biscuits. Six packets of them unopened in the cupboard at home. I could go on.

We drank more coffee, the four of us, and sat in familial silence with the papers. The day darkened, and Ann put on the lamps. I was nodding off when three sharp raps sounded at the front door – the wolf’s-head knocker announcing something from another world, a call from a police inspector or death in a comedy shroud. My neck was stiff; I opened the door on to a beautifully damp rush of evening air. There was nothing on the path but the steadily falling rain.

‘Did I dream that,’ I asked the others back in the living room, ‘or did someone knock?’

‘Yes,’ said Andy, ‘I heard it.’

‘Kids,’ murmured Tonia, ‘knock down Ginger.’

‘Dream on,’ Andy said, ‘more likely coming to rob you.’

Ann shivered. ‘Did you shut the door?’

Instead I wandered a little way along the rain-glimmered street until my shoes were wet and water slid ticklishly from my hairline down my face. Across the road, by the badly lit playground, central-locking lights flashed yellow on a car and a young white guy ran towards it, his puffer jacket slick and shiny in the rain. The car gunned off, its noise a fuck-you to the street. I was awake. Back in the house the first thing I noticed in the hallway was the smell. The bitter, flat stink of alcohol – where were the wine bottles? Where was the recycling bin? – the smell of cigarettes and of stale sweat on clothes, the scent released by the rain. Was this what Ann had smelled, what she had thought was an animal decaying behind the walls? I imagined the man then in front of me – his hooded sweatshirt, the split ends of his fingernails, the punched-up, wet-brain look on his face. All this was fleeting. When I walked back into the living room, the door closed on the street behind me, everybody I loved was still there and the smell and the man were gone.

N. A. M. W. 04. 07

The island accommodates just a dozen guests, and three couples are already at dinner when Tom and Ann step into the restaurant, a building modelled on the traditional style: thatch roof, glassless windows and the seaward wall missing. The tables are decorated with a single hibiscus flower. ‘Very restrained, ‘ says Tom, and Ann can tell by his tone that the surfeit of good taste is getting on his nerves.

She follows the young Indian woman with a long black plait to their table. The waitress is wearing a plain white shift dress identical to Ann’s. It glows against her dark skin. Ann is pale, freckled, red haired. She feels like a hospital patient in this pillow-slip dress. Someone is looking at her. Tom. The waitress. She sits down. ‘A vodka please,’ she says, hoping it is the right answer. ‘With lime.’

Sunset is long past. Outside, over the sea, streaks of pearly cloud underline the unfamiliar stars. A breeze licks through the restaurant.

Vincent Desjardin, the resort owner, enters some time after the marinated fish and shrimp sambal have been served, at first unnoticed in the doorway, then greeted with coos and light applause from his paying guests. Tom looks round, alarmed.

‘ It’s not for you.’ Ann bursts into quiet laughter. ‘Don’t panic.’

Desjardin’s hand is suddenly on Ann’s shoulder. ‘Ann. Tom. This is Jimmy, our ace fisherman.’ A Fijian man shakes her hand, then leans across the table to shake Tom’s. Ann feels Desjardin’s fingers, papery and cool, slowly leave her shoulder.

‘The fish is delicious,’ she offers.

‘Jimmy really knows these waters, ‘ says Desjardin. ‘Of course, Reverie Island was uninhabited when I bought it,’ he laughs, ‘this is not Diego Garcia -- but Jimmy’s tribe have been around this chain of islands for a pretty long time now. ‘

Jimmy nods as though putting up with the spiel is part of the job. ‘I’m fishing for maki tomorrow,’ he says, ‘judging by the weather.’

As he leaves, Ann notices a tattoo on his arm that looks like lettering. It is mostly hidden by his pale-blue sleeve: she can’t quite make it out. A small rectangle of words, like a page from a miniature book.

The other diners have gone. They are alone under the thatched roof, the warm wind coming in from the sea, the white tablecloth smooth between them, rum in their glasses, their heads thick from the drink and the frangipani and the sea, distances swinging. Ann feels drugged, she should go back to the bure, go to sleep, but she is too heavy and humming to move. This is their last night alone together before the producer, Halliburton, arrives. She’s never met him before and she isn’t looking forward to it. But for now it is the two of them perfectly alone. She is smiling at Tom and he is smiling at her, reaching across the oceans of white linen for her hands.

She knows what it is before she unfurls her fingers to look at it. Tom has slid his arms back, he is hugging himself with them, looking out at the darkness where the invisible sea lies, not looking at her. The ring is small and sharp in her palm. She holds it against the light of the glass lamp on the table top. The protected candle flame reflects and gleams in the gold of the ring.

‘ Is this, ‘ she says, ‘ is this … ?’

He meets her eye. ‘ If you like, ‘ he says, and she thinks he has never been so vulnerable, the knowing of it and half laughing at it not making him any less so. ‘Yes it is.’

She smiles at him. She has been smiling at him for some time. ‘Yes. ‘

When Stella calls, even the ring of the telephone sounds commanding. She was coming up to town for a little light shopping and intended to take me to lunch. This meant a linen tablecloth establishment in South Ken. where she had once seen Sean Connery. She will no longer consider eating anywhere else. ‘He was looking at me,’ she tells me every time, ‘most definitely at me. A very direct gaze.’ It was a bus to Liverpool Street and then the achingly slow Circle line – I left home an hour and a half before we were due to meet and arrived just in time, which is to say a minute after Stella had arrived and already requested another table from the one she had been shown to (a habit of Bridget’s too, hence my trick of arriving late to avoid the embarrassment of traversing the restaurant, wine glass in hand, jacket over my arm, and the I’ll-take-it-no-I’ll-take-it tussle with the waiter over the menu). She shook the new scarf she had bought from its tissue paper and passed it over for me to admire.

‘How is Ann? When will she stop work? She seemed pressured at Christmas time, though perhaps that was having guests, as you know I cannot stand to have people to stay and avoid it wherever possible. Of course I will make an exception for my grandchild. Or grandchildren, if Ann takes to motherhood she might well have another quite quickly, plenty of older women are having babies these days though it must be hard to find the energy, perhaps that’s where all the young Romanian nannies come in. Better than prostitution. Poor young Romanian women. We’re terribly lucky Tom, we must appreciate our good fortune, there’s only random chance to thank for our freedom. Oh, I must tell you there has been the most enormous fuss in our area about a gypsy camp.’

All this slid from her uninterrupted as I chewed a grissini. Grissino, grissina? Simon would know.

‘Brought out the most unattractive aspect in people. We left a drinks party because of the way Willy Handforth – you know Willy – had been talking. Most provocative. And there is his daughter, a lesbian, not that that’s the same thing at all, but there she is pregnant by her sperm donor,’ the voice did not pause, did not drop at this: at a neighbouring table a man in an expensive suit glanced my mother’s way, ‘and Willy of all people is talking about the decay of the moral fabric! It isn’t the poor gypsies’ fault they’ve got no money, they’re dreadfully oppressed all through Europe, education is the key. If they are going to settle in communities, which is far more likely to help them achieve than all this – roaming – what’s the word …?’

She was still partially trying it on for size, old age, but this was Stella as she would become, increasingly emphatic and brassed-off by the failings of her memory.

‘Nomadic,’ I supplied.

‘Nomadic. Well it doesn’t work any more, does it, in this day and age, but that’s no reason to lose their culture, their traditions. They should be supported, helped into housing, into education. Especially the women who are themselves oppressed by the men.’

‘Hmn.’

‘You know sometimes I think the temperance movement should be revived.’

I waggled my glass at hers.

She laughed. ‘I know, but truly, Stanley Marriott – you know Stanley, Justice Marriott – ninety per cent of the terrible cases he sees are alcohol related. They talk about a cocaine epidemic,’ again, nicely enunciated for the suits at the next table, I swear she got a sexual thrill from this, although that is the last time I want to think about my mother in that way, ‘but booze is far, far worse.’

By pudding I had been reminded of a good half-dozen people my mother knew – most of them terribly influential, having ‘the ear of all sorts of people’ and given a whistle-stop tour of her politics. She is liberal in her own lunch time, my mother, and believes she could tell the Home Secretary a thing or two thank you very much, while retaining the unshakeable baseline opinion that her brand of English tolerance ‘ with limits is the only right way of living in the world. The oxymoronic aspects of this core belief do not give her any trouble.

‘So tell me about work,’ she said. One of her great and good acquaintances had a son who was doing rather well in writing for the cinema, as she put it. The name, mercifully, escaped her. But he was in Los Angeles now, having meetings. Somebody important had bought his last film after it was in a festival. Had I ever heard of – she pronounced it – Meeramax?

I nodded. ‘That’s great for him, fantastic,’ and smiled to show at least I was making an effort.

‘How is the new draft coming along?’

I hadn’t had the heart, or the guts, to tell her. ‘Fine.’

‘Now.’ She had twiddled her fingers in the air for the bill. Her long, rectangular Smythson clutch was suddenly on the table. She placed her credit card in the waiter’s proffered black folder. A chequebook emerged. I took a sip of water. Over the years she had often flicked me the odd hundred quid, but I just felt sick at continuing to take her money even though we needed it badly. We had long given up euphemising these handouts as loans. Pocketing the cheques I felt cold, like a worm; banking them made me elated. On the way here I had sworn to myself it would stop.

‘Did you drive up?’ I asked.

Finally she lowered her voice. ‘Now. How are you and Ann off for money at the moment?’

The feeling was like a caffeine surge on an empty stomach, and I almost thought I would vomit. She had already started writing my name. Two hundred pounds would tide us over, if we were careful, until Ann got paid. Put food in the fridge. Pay the interest on the credit card. Halt the escalating traffic fines.

‘We’re great, Mum, it’s kind of you to ask but you can put your purse away. Thank you for lunch.’

She shot me a look over her invisible pince-nez. ‘You sure?’

‘Absolutely. Things are great.’

‘Good.’ She gave a half-nod, and a quick proud inhalation in the direction of the suits. You see? They might be corporate lions on expense accounts but here, lying to her and keeping the extent of the disaster even from his wife, was her magnificent son!

Ann began to sculpt again. She hadn’t for a long time – probably, if I thought about it, since we were married. They began to appear, those odd little clay figures that had always slightly given me the shivers. One of them was waiting for me when I came down to breakfast on a Monday morning. I had watched DVDs late into the night before and when I woke up Ann had already left for work. The house was softly full with that intoxicating hush of someone’s recent departure. In my robe and slippers I padded down the stairs, looking at the hallway floor for any envelopes. In winter, sunlight from the living room didn’t reach the hall, and the space was dark and church-like. After scooping up the various bills and mini-cab flyers I paused in the doorway to the living room, thinking about putting music on, but the neighbourhood was quiet at this time of day and I enjoyed that. If I didn’t open the door or look through the windows I could be anywhere – my cage was not Hackney, East London, but rather this cool, dim, airy structure of grey-white walls, rough wooden stairs and paint-splattered floorboards. With my eyes shut to outside it might as well be Notting Hill, and this house, I mused as I flicked through the windowed envelopes whose brightly coloured corporate initials spelled looming destitution, would be worth a bomb in Notting Hill. Even Islington, it might be Islington out there with, OK, its share of street crime, but the cafés! The fishmongers! The Screen on the Green! Better still the house might stand high and alone in the mountains somewhere, a Victorian folly erected by a madman. No jumped-up food shops, no cinemas, just the purple hills rolling out far into the distance, outlined in black. Such were my thoughts as I paused in the hallway. My mind was still murky with sleep when I entered the kitchen and saw a blackened homunculus staring at me from its perch on the bench. The letters fell from my hand and hit the floor with a slithery sound. The man was made of clay, and rubbed with soot – my fingertip came away smeared with charcoal. Its body was the size of a coffee mug and it had one sort of fused leg massed into a seated posture so it could balance on the bench edge. A thumb had been pressed in where its face used to be, giving it a spoon-like aspect, but then two eyeholes had been scratched in too so that out of its inverted face it seemed to be capable of a squint. My instinct was to throw a tea towel over it but past experience with the fragility of Ann’s objects prevented me. Was it a joke? A little message? Or had she just been noodling around and not considered that it would look as though the man were meant for me? This was the problem with Ann, you never knew when to take it personally. Whatever was behind it I didn’t want to have the damn thing sitting down here all day, staring into the middle distance like some parody of me, a floor above it in my office, staring into my computer screen. It did look kind of like me, even with the spoon face and conjoined legs – a sort of slouch in the shoulders. Perhaps while I was working it would hop up, hip-wiggle around to make a cup of tea, have a flick through the Independent. I swore out loud with frustration.

When I finally got through the hospital phone system and reached Ann, I made sure to remove all trace of disgust from my voice. ‘Is he for me?’ I asked, in the hopeful, dare-I-dream way a child might enquire of a puppy.

‘Not really,’ said Ann, ‘It’s for the house. A sort of guardian. I don’t know, I got itchy fingers.’

‘I thought I was the guardian of the house.’

She laughed. ‘Another one.’

‘Do you think he’s very fragile?’

‘No.’

‘Good. I’d hate to knock him over while I’m wiping the bench.’

‘You can move him if you like.’ I loved her for saying that. It was impossible not to hear the trace of reluctance in her voice.

‘No no. He’s good there.’

And so there he sat, covered with a prisoner art tea towel that had been a house-warming present from Tonia. It was, I told myself, glancing over my shoulder as I left the room to check that it hadn’t moved, just like having a budgerigar asleep in a cage. I was very pleased Ann was working again. But still, as I shrugged off my robe to step into the shower, a shudder passed down my back. I locked the bathroom door. Even then an unwanted thought buzzed inside me, wouldn’t leave me alone. Not a thought, a knowledge, something existing below the solar plexus. A known fact. The last time Ann made these figures was when we came back early from Fiji.

N.A.M.W. 05. 07

The resort workers have decorated a little pavilion between two palm trees on the south side of their small island. Tom stands beneath the sweeping bellies of pinned silk. Tentacles of frangipani and bougainvillaea trail around him. The hibiscus blooms, hot crimsons gathered in each corner of the canopy, are already closing into wrinkled flutes against the dense air. He wilts in the heat, in his long-sleeved white shirt and the charcoal trousers he flew in. He looks like a waiter. His feet are bare on the shaded sand. It is late in the afternoon and the day’s heat has intensified, doubled in on itself to exude from every grain of sand, every leaf, a thick throbbing heat that makes Tom, pinprick aware and woozy all at once, feel he must be in a dream.

Around the corner of the bay, out of sight of Tom and the pavilion, is a canoe strung with white flowers, manned by three of the fishermen with blue-inked scrolls along their backs. Ann’s own mark, her scar, is visible; she wears a white linen shift dress from the resort boutique. Panic comes in a peristaltic wave. All sound is indistinct, the swishing of the surf the only frequency her ear can pick up, its small grey noise determined and soft. The men push off from the shore, paddle efficiently through the gentle water.

A group of women from the nearby island sit cross-legged on special cloths laid over the sand, their smock-dresses bright, bell-like. Ann sees the pavilion, Desjardin in his coloniser’s cream suit. The night before he tried to deflect Tom’s questions about the coup with his little shrug. ’I blame you British, right? You give them God, penicillin, tourism -- of course they’re mad at you.’ After he’d gone Tom made a small exploding noise under his breath. ‘Nuclear arsehole, ‘ he said. ‘Typical French prick.’

And there is Tom, the man she is marrying for real this time, no fingers crossed, Tom who must be sweltering in crow-like black trousers, that damp shirt. Is it too late? Ann thinks of the coral garden she saw from the glass-bottomed boat tour she took while Tom was working. One by one, they had tipped over the edge to snorkel in the tepid water over the reef. She had lain suspended with her arms out like a starfish, no sound but the in and out of her breathing rasping loudly all around her. Can she dive down into the water, disappear into the coral kingdom, never come back? The choir of women roll out ‘Amazing Grace’ , drowning the sound of the sea.

Ann bursts into tears in the middle of her vows and crying, laughing, opens her face towards Tom -- he doesn’t know what to do with the moment, giddy with heat and luck. Desjardin softly touches Ann’s arm, sympathetic, giving her a moment to compose herself. The ceremony is brief, or maybe time is running fast. The official language brings her back into herself. This is a contract, a legal agreement, and that sharpness, the scratch of Desjardin’s Montblanc pen on the register, comes as a lifeline amidst all the fruity perfume and foliage. Surely that frangipani stem, so waxily perfect, cannot be real.

But that flowing-over feeling from the wedding -- the world shiny and new -- stays with Ann through the guitar-strumming night, the bitter druggy burn of the kava, her tongue too numbed to properly talk, the whump in her chest of the drums as a group of islanders fire-walk under the thick velvet sky.

Tom scrambles to his feet. Red-faced, muttering. His voice more English than ever, ‘Hello John, hello.’ He is embarrassed, she divines it instantly, that he has spent the afternoon getting married instead of working.

John Halliburton is a monster, a colossus in shorts and a patterned shirt, he booms and thwacks and grabs her wrists so hard they might break, twists her hand to see the ring. ‘Married on my dime, eh!’ he shouts over the drumming. The night sky clings at her, the palm fronds, the fire, the oily surface of the pool. She has to leave.

This is the wrong bure. She apologises to the guest she has woken. Desjardin is somehow there. Can’t ask him for help. Knows his type. The water smells like all the water here, slightly sulphurous. Soft in her mouth. The bed-sheets are soft and she presses her face into them. Gets up again to check she has locked the cabin door. It all ends indefinitely and not as anyone means it to, this wedding day, Ann curled in sleep beneath the pristine white sheets in their cabin, Tom rolling in the sand with a rum bottle sticky and empty between his knees, Halliburton somewhere behind them in the back of the dunes, howling with laughter.

I don’t know. We got married in Fiji. Hallie arrived that night. We drank too much kava. Ann locked the door of the bure. The rest is only a guess.

It’s quite an experiment, if you’re a middle-class urbanite, to have to live without buying any new produce until everything in the pantry is gone. I’d banned myself from bookshops until I had read all of the books on my shelves; now Ann imposed a similar restriction on food. For the first week it was no hardship. We had enough packets of pasta, cans of borlotti beans, tinned tomatoes and jars of pesto to survive a small Tuscan apocalypse. Tuna, you may remember from your student days, can be rendered interesting in multiple ways if you don’t think about cat food. Brown rice bestows moral superiority for at least an hour. All of those wacky jars – Indonesian pickles from a trip to Amsterdam, pitted cherries, jalapeño peppers, salsa, olives, Christmas mince – that had been transported, dusty-lidded, from one house to another over the years, at last came into their own. In the second week, wakame and arame from Ann’s dried seaweed phase, amaranth and millet from the obscure grains period, and that lingering can of sauerkraut provided us with some much-needed nutrients. By week three my gums were bleeding. While Ann was at work I raided the back of the sofa for enough pennies to buy a softish apple or ten Silk Cut from the corner shop.

Ann was getting healthier as the pregnancy wore on, drinking nothing but loony tea and doing yoga though she could no longer touch her toes. The fridge was practically bare but for her mysterious tinctures and herbal supplements. Where had these come from? Vile though they smelled, something in them worked: the pale moony cream of her skin and warm glowing hair almost became light sources. Her eyes shone like polished glass. We could have saved on electricity, I joked, and just had Ann standing lamp-like in the corner of every room. Heat pumped from her, although her hands and feet were always icy. This newly poor circulation, the gloves and socks in bed at night, the stinging fingers checking the bath temperature each morning, gave her pleasure because it meant the blood was thumping around the baby instead. Martyrdom begins.

Andy and I had begun a new running circuit, meeting at the rose gardens in Victoria Park. They still hadn’t found the murderer of a young woman jogger who had been killed there about a year earlier. There’d been similar attacks in two North London parks since, and the killer was thought to be a teenage boy. I don’t know why we still used Victoria Park. There was, I suppose, nowhere else to go, except maybe the canals, where a suitcase containing a dismembered young woman had recently been opened up by some kids. No wonder we practised our running. Sometimes I asked myself what I would do if such a suitcase should bob along the water past my feet – any suitcase, in fact. Fish it out or keep on walking? Did I secretly yearn to save a woman from a hooded teenage knife-wielder? Did I seriously think I could?

The park smelled of wet earth; our trainers skidded now and again on the paths. Andy took tiny steps, running at an almost stationary shuffle, his elbows winging out as though he was doing the chicken dance. Although the shortest day had passed the night closed in quickly. When we reached the gates, juicy with sweat, breathing hard, they were locked. My hands closed around the cold iron bars; I leaned my slippery head against their coolness, breath clouding in front of my face. The spikes at the top were enough to put us off trying to climb over, even if we hadn’t been wheezing like a couple of old men. I tried the council on my mobile phone while Andy jogged off, clutching a stitch in his side, to find the park keeper. As the phone rang and rang into an empty office I wondered if this was the moment when I would see the man, whether now he would lumber up to me, perhaps even on the other side of the gate’s bars, look hard at the ground with his ratty face under the hood and deliver me a message.

The little monitor on the side of my phone flared and died: out of battery. I was starting to get properly cold, and did some jogging on the spot. I called out for Andy, not very loud, self-conscious because a small gang of boys was watching me from across the road and I didn’t want to look afraid or make them laugh. A couple of them sat on the bonnet of a car, smoking, while one wheeled around them on a stripped-down scooter that was undoubtedly stolen and another just leaned against the passenger door, glaring at the world as though he dared it to come any closer.

‘You stuck, man?’ one of the boys on the car called, and they laughed.

‘Yeah.’ The streetlights were on but it was not entirely dark yet. During a break in our run, Andy had told me a brief staff-room anecdote about one of the other teachers, a man I’d met round at theirs, a white South African guy who had to do daily battle with the children who mocked his accent. The clock was ticking for this fellow, Andy said, London was slowly getting to him, it was only a matter of time.

The boys had sauntered over the road to stand directly on the other side of the gate. I willed myself not to back away. The one who’d called out to me proffered a pack of B&H Gold through the railings; I smiled and shook my head.

‘Thanks, no. Trying to get fit, you know?’ I despised myself for the nervous middle-class granddad routine, getting down with the kids, but was aware of having no alternative. This was me; this was all I could do. For at least the last decade I’d been under the illusion that I was invisible to male aggressors, whether they were my own age or younger. It was the one decent thing about getting older: guys with something to prove didn’t give a shit about you any more. Unless, like now, you were trapped on the other side of some bars like a monkey in a zoo, an early evening entertainment.

Casually, not at all in a panicky where-the-fuck-is-he way, I looked around for any sign of Andy. Surely he had found the park keeper by now. It occurred to me to go and look for him, but without my mobile I was as lost as a child, and – I only realised it in that moment, with a hot flush of shame – in the back of my mind I was convinced that the man, Ann’s stalker, lived in the park. Here he appeared in my imagination fully fleshed, a boogeyman bush-dweller, ready to stumble from the undergrowth, his breath reeking, to mark me with a contaminated paw. Meanwhile the hooded spiders, who probably had an average age of twelve but posed a far more tangible threat than my unmaterialised man, were climbing the gates.

When Andy finally showed up, in response to my now unrestrained cries for help, the kids were gone and I had been well and truly mugged. I had not explained to the boys about the phone having died, but let them take it without complaint. Of course even in my sad old tracksuit pants pocket I had brought my credit card, planning to stop at the wine shop on the way home, so they had that too. It was so odd standing there, waiting, my insides boiling as the boys levered themselves over the spikes at the top of the gates: the leader looked as though he’d done it a hundred times and knew just how to place his hands, like a Russian gymnast, supporting himself on his wrists to hoist himself over the top. The efficiency of movement made it clear there was no point trying to run. We could have been different species then, those boys and I.

The shuddering wouldn’t stop, even at home, even in bed through that cold, cold night. I don’t remember getting home, only lying on the sofa while above my head Andy joked to Ann about the credit card getting used less by the muggers than by me. Every time I saw her she was on the phone, getting through to the bank, or the police, or Orange to report the mobile lost. She thought I was in shock but the scabby doctor, next morning, diagnosed bronchitis and a lung infection. Ann took the day off work to look after me, and the next. Two rounds of tetracycline had no effect other than to give me stomach cramps and make me sweat, which I did in bed, slipping in and out of sleep, Ann’s blue Ventolin inhaler in my fist. My meagre productivity slowed to a trickle, nothing more than surrounding myself with pages of redrafts and spending hallucinatory afternoons watching the telly at the foot of the bed.

Ann returned to her days at Barts, heading out wrapped in enormous blanket clothes like an Inuit woman. Before she left she would bring me lemon and honey drinks, toast on a tray, and the latest example of her sculpting. The little people accumulated fast. It was like being Gulliver in your own home. Soon I recognised familiar faces. My mother rendered in salt-shaker-sized clay, the pleased and proud set of her jaw, a quick firm line of mouth Ann had pressed in with a thumbnail, so she looked at once utterly herself and also the self-appointed Mayor of Toytown. Costcutter’s slipper lady made an appearance, doomed even in miniature, her standards as well as her stoop somehow appreciably lower than those of her clay compatriots. There were Andy and Tonia, sweetly, if blindly, embracing, faces buried in one another’s shoulders. All these were three-dimensional sketches, work Ann did quickly, intuitively, late at night or early in the morning – sometimes all night, moulding the people by hand, a brief squeeze here, a smudge of thumb and fingers, a slow careful twist. The oven timer was constantly on, these soulless little creatures forging on a low heat. Maybe it would have been nice to have a wife who baked biscuits, but through my illness I was proud of Ann’s productivity. A couple of workmates grew overnight, the dumpy receptionist and a hulking orderly. Kids from the estate with foetal alcohol syndrome. The moon-faced man always standing outside the off-licence. One by one the neighbourhood crept indoors. She refused to do me: ‘You’ll hate it,’ she laughed, ‘people always do.’ I knew she was right, though I longed to see myself reflected through her hands. She was magnificent then, the apron stretched over her belly smeared with clay dust, high from lack of sleep, from the sheer output she was forming, the incremental covering of every surface – mantelpiece, stereo speakers, between the newel posts on the stairs – in her work. The one figure she returned to, over and over again in different forms, was the slipper lady. Even when the body changed, became twig-like or pear-shaped, the air of craziness hung around her, of being askew in the world. Ann couldn’t say why she was so fascinating, just that, ‘She knows something we don’t.’

‘Yes,’ I said, reaching to turn out the bedside light and knocking some homunculus or other to the floor. ‘What food from a rubbish bin tastes like.’

‘Don’t be mean. She doesn’t eat out of bins. She’s got dignity.’

‘Oh my God,’ I laughed, ‘that is the one thing she hasn’t got. She goes outdoors in her nightie.’

‘Her slippers. I think that thing she wears is actually a dress. I like the way she doesn’t care whether she’s in public or not. That’s the point.’

‘Don’t you think it’s a bit sad clown to be romanticising this tragic old bat?’

‘Oh, fuck off.’

A coughing fit overtook me. Ann passed me a glass of water, which I drank before saying, ‘You’re telling me to fuck off an awful lot lately.’

‘I wonder why.’

‘Come and have a cuddle.’

‘I want to work. Populate our house with more pathetic ladies.’

‘Please. I’m ill.’

‘Poor baby.’

She slid into bed with me, and we held each other. I drifted off to sleep like a king. In the middle of the night I woke to find her side of the bed empty. My clever wife, working. The air above me was cool, but under the blankets I was cosseted, snug. Soon it would be Ann’s birthday. We would have a big party, and she could display her figurines on the night – a kind of joke on our expanding family. Ann’s friends would be impressed, and if the right people came – who these might be I had no idea, about the art world I am clueless – she might be offered a show. She would work while the baby rocked in a Moses basket, I would clear out the tiny shed in the back garden and build her a proper studio. No more cancer patients. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this simple and brilliant plan earlier. Despite the hour, despite the cold, I swung out of bed to go downstairs and tell her. As soon as I stood my empty papier-máché head bobbed forwards and I nearly fell, but steadied myself on the armchair. The dizziness was not unpleasant. My knee joints were weak and filled with sugar syrup. There was my jumper. I could see it draped over the armchair. It took me three reaches to pick it up. My shoulders aching, I pulled it on, rallying to its daytime feel. Tomorrow I would shower and dress, no matter how bad my chest. The soles of my feet sparked with cold, recoiling from the hard chill floorboards. The bedroom door opened like a deep freeze, into a wall of cold vapour. The landing was misty, grey, as though we lived in a dolls’ house with the wall lifted away, our miniature lives open to the night, and I quickly started down the stairs, my mind on the slippers by the front door. Ann must have a window open, I thought, was she trying to kill me? And then I stopped thinking, as you do when it’s numbingly cold. Quick, quick, through the silent middle floor to the hall downstairs – ah, the slippers, their red-and-green tartan muted to grey checks in the half-light. I had just slid them on when my body stopped moving. Slowly my brain worked out it had frozen at the sound of talking. From the kitchen, down the length of the hallway, a line of bright light shone under the door. Ann’s voice. Not the burble of talking to oneself. The straight road sound of telling somebody something. A silence. Then, unmistakably, the deep, urgent timbre of a man. ‘ARGID BLEDDIN LOGEL MUD.’ The voice cut off abruptly. My own breath was loud, mouth open.

Then Ann again, louder: ‘Tom? Is that you?’

She opened the kitchen door, an oblong blaze of light surrounding her silhouette.

‘Who’s there?’ I called.

‘It’s me.’

‘Who’s with you?’

‘Nobody.’ She began to walk towards me. ‘You’re shaking.’ From a long, long distance her thin fingers touched my face. Her thin fingers touched my face. ‘For Christ’s sake, Tom, you’re burning up.’

‘I heard talking.’

She shook her head. Ann, dear Ann, she looked so familiar then, so reassuring and concerned. ‘The radio. I’m listening to the radio.’

I started to walk towards the kitchen. She stood in my way. ‘You should go back to bed.’

‘I’d like a drink of water.’

‘I’ll get it.’

All of a sudden it was too hard to stand up any more. Blackness swam on the edges, my nose and hands were cold. I pulled myself along to the bottom of the stairs and thudded down, then carefully dropped my hot, swollen head between my knees and shut my eyes. Projected on to my closed lids was a memory vision, the sickly green rectangle of light, the centre obscured by the blackness of Ann’s shape.

She helped me take the stairs back up to bed, slowly, pausing on the landing for me to cough. ‘I’ll go back to the doctor tomorrow,’ I said once I had lain down and Ann had pulled the covers over me. Though she said I had a fever, I was frozen to my core and the piles of winter duvets didn’t feel weighty enough. We had a little tussle over me not wanting to remove my jumper.

‘Don’t go back to that horrible place,’ she said, ‘I think that waiting room made you worse anyway.’

It was hard to argue with that. The stained carpet, the dozens of people waiting on broken plastic chairs, the People’s Friend magazines with their cheap soft paper, the children with slugs of snot making glacial progress towards their mouths, it all screamed infection, infection. What would we do when the baby was born? Could we inflict this Petri dish environment on our own child? There were whole supplements every week in my newspaper, family supplements full of headlines about immunisation and school holidays, that I had thus far been able to avoid. Soon we, too, would madly seek the best, only the best even in darkest Hackney, no food that was not organic, no man-made fibres, no microwaves, the pure tonal shifts of Bach mathematically bouncing off every surface. We would join the ranks of middle-class hopefuls attempting to create a master race in their own Ikea kitchens. Could we become the wankers I’d read about in the Guardian that take their kids to Harley Street for cranial osteopathy? I shut my eyes. I would put nothing past us.

Two or three days followed in a dream. Ann took more time off work to keep an eye on me. The thought of giving her the virus, whatever it was, worried me but she insisted she’d never felt stronger. She brought me soup on a tray, turned the radio off when I fell asleep, read me the paper, changed the sheets. My temperature rose and fell and rose again.

‘Ann. Ann.’

The blinds were down, the room nearly dark. It must have been late afternoon. Twilight is when you feel lost, the day washed away taking with it everything you know.

‘Ann.’ I had thought she was in here, but maybe not. The jug beside the bed was empty.

‘Ann.’ A fear seized me that perhaps she had gone out. I was afraid without her. And as though the force of my need summoned her, the bedroom door opened and there she stood.

‘Darling. I’ll get you some water.’

‘Ann. I keep thinking there’s someone in the house.’ My sleep was full of a shadowy figure sitting on the end of the bed, or a man downstairs who wouldn’t give his name.

‘Kate’s here.’

‘Oh.’

‘Shall I bring her up to say hello? I didn’t think you’d feel like seeing anyone.’

‘No. I hope she doesn’t think I’m rude.’

‘Of course not.’

I drank my water and strained to hear the conversation far below. Not even a distinguishable murmur. Fevered as I was, I imagined Kate and Ann as just-frozen statues outside the bedroom door, breathing as silently as possible, listening to me trying to listen to them. This was nuts. I rose dizzily from the bed and creaked over to the bedroom mirror. Ah, Christ. Not the pale, drawn invalid of fantasy, but an unshaved, puffy and red-nosed self. My beard grew in alopecic, testosterone-deficient patches. If Kate could see me she would be revolted, put off. Put off from what? Did I want her to like me? I scraped a longish fingernail against the white crust that had gathered in the corners of my lips. The days away from running had left the skin over my ribs slack already. The door opened too quickly for me to leap out of sight.

‘Jesus, Ann.’ I dived for my robe and the bed at the same time. The door slammed.

‘Sorry!’ Ann called from the hallway. ‘I thought you were asleep.’

Silence. After a few seconds the landing floor creaked and I knew they had gone away. Under the duvet I clutched my robe tight around me. The dreams that followed were short, prosaic, peppered with sudden physical jolts. And then I was aware of people in the room. Kate and Ann stood at the window, having a whispered conversation. Sleep wrapped its soft grey hands around my eyes, and I succumbed.

‘Sometimes in the night I’ve thought of going out there with a brick and taking out the light.’ Ann said that. Kate laughing. Another, lighter sound, of metal rattling, which I couldn’t identify. Maybe I spoke in my sleep. A hand pressed firmly down on my forehead. Kate. I knew it before I flicked my eyes open, briefly, to see her tawny stare pouring directly down upon me. Her fingers were warm and dry. They would come away greasy. This thought left me as I let sleep take over again, under her hand, the pressure of it oddly lightening, helping me float away.

Later that night Ann gave me a spoonful of herbal medicine, a concoction that was as hard to keep down as a mouthful of barky mud, was of much the same consistency and had a powerful burn. No sooner had it guttered down my throat than I was seized by a deep coughing, a cold hand reaching inside my chest and wringing out the lungs. The air I gasped in was sickly with eucalyptus. Calmly she passed me a bowl, as though she had been expecting the retching that followed. Everything inside my head fell away. Whiteness swamped in from the periphery and I passed out.

I was out for two days.

I woke to Ann’s profile next to me in bed. She was white, carved of wax, deeply asleep. In a rush I sat up. Kate was in a chair in a corner, her face just revealed between the thick black curtains of her hair.

‘Tom.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Ann needed to rest. The remedy made you sleep.’

Remedy. I breathed in and tried to cough. Nothing. She stood up and stretched.

‘I’ll make some tea.’

While she was downstairs I snatched clothes from the drawer, ran down a floor to the bathroom, scrubbed myself under the shower and dressed. We met on the stairs.

‘I’ll come down,’ I said.

In the kitchen she passed me a mug of licorice and mint. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Great,’ I said, ‘like I’ve been hoovered out by a particularly strong Serbian cleaning lady. I think there’s a Magic Tree hanging where my sinuses used to be.’

‘Good.’

‘Should I thank you? Is this your natural remedy juju at work?’

She smiled. ‘It’s all right.’

We studied each other for a moment. I felt remarkably clear and sort of high. ‘I’m worried about Ann,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘She’s quite hyper.’

‘It could be the hormones.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘But you think something else?’

‘… No.’ Kate waited. ‘Well she’s so busy, you see, as though she’s trying not to listen to something.’ I couldn’t bring myself to mention the abortions, wondering whether they might have inspired some kind of guilt fit now she was having a baby. It would have been like trying to speak Tagalog suddenly and finding out Kate was fluent. ‘Her mother died when Ann was little. She never talks about her childhood, it’s as though life started when she came here.’ Whoa, this was a flume train of indiscretion. I had no judgement, in so many years I’d never talked to anyone about Ann and now I’d tipped myself over the slope it was hard to know how to stop. Kate asked whether Ann or I had ever been to ‘see someone’.

‘No. And I wouldn’t. I can’t bear therapists. Ann can’t either. No offence.’

‘None taken. I can give you some herbs.’

‘She’s already taking loads.’ Suddenly I realised – Tom, you retard – Kate was giving her those. Of course. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘The other thing, Tom, is that she’s under a lot of pressure. All women feel intense about having a baby, whether they’ve been pregnant before or not. And she’s working’ – this was her way around saying she’s worried about money– ‘and she’s been very frightened about that man.’

‘Has she seen him again? Has she told you?’ Revealing my distrust. I was hopeless at this. Time to shut the door.

‘Just more about that day of the derailment. Seeing him at her work.’

‘Kate.’ I was bracing myself to say, ‘Do you think there is any chance Simon might have some work for me,’ when the stairs above me creaked and Ann called out, ‘Hello?’

* * *

On the doorstep we stopped dead. Light bounced off the snow that lay draped in swathes over the street like so many abandoned evening gloves; the lowering grot of litter lay hidden beneath these rivulets of heart-lifting, purifying white. The plane tree outside our house – the lucky tree, Ann called it, the one that had made us buy the place – cast witch finger shadows across our path and we walked in the direction they pointed, away from the bus stop and the Costcutter, towards the swelling sky in the east. The glare was dizzying; the pavement rose and fell without warning.

‘Look at you,’ Ann laughed, ‘you’re a newborn foal. You all right to do this?’

‘Post-convalescent high.’ Even the air seemed clear – an illusion brought on by the cold thinness of it, as though we were in the Alps.

‘You know Andy is beating himself up.’

‘He could have got those boys to do it and saved himself the bother.’

‘Was it his fault?’

‘Not at all. He’s mad to feel it was.’

‘He’d seen them there before he ran off, he said.’

‘So had I. I could have gone with him. They did it, they’re responsible.’

‘Why didn’t you go with him?’

A sports field opened up on the other side of the road, puddled with patches of snow. We were near one of the motorway onramps; you could hear traffic. A lone jogger chugged along the side of the field, his breath visible.

‘I don’t know.’ There was no reason why I shouldn’t have joined Andy in search of the park keeper. Was it my fault I had been mugged? Had I, having lived in London all these years, learned nothing?

Ann looked across at me, then away. ‘Not that I think you brought it on yourself.’

The phrase popped from her mouth with the force of relieved pressure, a ping-pong ball of thought she had been dying to get rid of. Of course that’s what she thought. Inside she was screaming at me, ‘You brought it on yourself.’

I wanted a cigarette, and knew there was a Londis on the next street. A quick drag was needed to settle my lungs again, settle my nerves. I coughed in anticipation. We rounded the corner and a squirt of acid shot through my bowels. Three boys in hoods stood in front of the Londis right in our path, one leaning against the railing, the others bulking out the footpath in full harassment mode. I grabbed Ann’s elbow and spun her around, back around the corner, walking quickly in the direction from which we had come. All the way down that road my spine twanged with the sense of them coming after us, their footfalls soft in trainers, the shushing of their shell suits, the laughing whisper of their threats. ‘Look at him, he’s fucking bricking it,’ one of the muggers had said that night a week ago. ‘Why’n’t you run now?’ They’d all laughed. ‘Run, old man, you going to run?’ The one who’d been first over the fence made a vooshing sound and mocked up a slow-motion action hero run towards me, stopping inches from my face.

‘Tom, it’s all right, they’re not following.’

Ann had stopped walking. She was calling to my back. I took a moment before turning around and returning to her. The empty street felt an unexpected luxury.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That was silly.’

‘No.’

‘They weren’t even the same guys.’ We walked on together, her arm hooked through mine. The baby bump protruded sideways these days too; walking like this with Ann was reassuring in the same way that it slows your heart rate down to stroke a cow. So to speak.

‘They didn’t need to be the same guys. They’re a type.’

‘I don’t know how people tell them apart. They all look alike.’ She laughed.

‘Do you ever think—?’ I was going to ask her about the man that had been following her, if she’d somehow conflated more than one homeless guy to produce a pattern of stalking. But I wasn’t quite ready to question the man’s existence. Not ready for the question it would really be asking of Ann. ‘Kate’s pretty impressive.’

Ann smiled to herself. ‘Yes.’

My head hurt and the muscles around my ribs still ached from coughing. A low-slung car with blacked-out windows prowled down the street. We were nearly home.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Ann said.

Oh my God. ‘No. No. Do you?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

Such are the differences between men and women. Ann read her horoscope most days. She and Tonia talked about people in terms of their ‘energy’ and ‘spirit’, this gateway language that led straight to hardcore, A-class beliefs in ESP, visions and their own spooky powers. They had coincidental dreams, which they bothered to repeat. They paid for massage from practitioners who didn’t even touch them, and claimed to feel the benefits. In their language, the universe was less a space–time continuum than a cosmic deity that bestowed favours or withdrew pleasures according to whether or not you had been a good girl. I had actually heard this from both of them: ‘The universe is trying to teach me something.’ ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ comes from the same English–New Age translation phrase book. That’s why I didn’t bother to go into it. Excuses, excuses.

N.A.M.W. 05. 07

The horror of his bigness, his redness, he couldn’t be more Ocker if he tried. He clearly likes it this way, it must unnerve the money guys. Slaps himself fatly.

‘Married on my dime!’

Tom leans over, tipping on to her, laughing, kissing her -- she pushes him, not now – pulling back to say, ‘Ann’s been married before. I’m her second husband.’ He’s proud of it, the dickhead. Why does she feel so hostile? The kava – the long hot day – something is making her sick.

Hallie glances at her sideways. ‘You Australian?’

Tom looks impressed. ‘You clocked it. Set a thief to catch a thief.’

‘You told me, mate. ‘

Some seconds tock by while Hallie looks at Ann’s upper arm. She raises her other hand to cover it, catches his gaze. Drops her hand and looks away. She will not look at him. Time is opening. She needs to leave. In the space between them his bulk swells and inverts, becomes silence.

Tom tips his head back and the edges of his vision flare and bleed in the torch light. Cones of fire against the black sky. You can’t get it back. This is your wedding night, you’ve drunk too much you’ve fallen you’re under the spell under the toad and you can never get this night back.

Ann is standing in the doorway of the wrong bure, apologising to another guest, someone she has woken by mistake. She is in her bathroom splashing water into her mouth. She is alone in bed. Someone is knocking on the door.

The bure is at the north end of the island, near a hill with a white wooden cross. Tom gets the words ‘wedding’ and ‘funeral’ mixed up. The day before Ann had sat swinging her legs over the edge of the balcony, her feet golden underwater, their edges wobbling in and out in the refracted light. An orange dove flapped past her and back towards the trees behind. In exchange, a pair of seabirds swooped out over the sea, lifting and falling, joyously firing forwards.

I woke to the sound of a person moving furniture around. The long stretch of bed beside me was empty. Ann’s energy dazzled me, even in my sleep-dampened state; I pushed my head deeper into the mattress, in contrast to Ann’s busyness, conscious only of the duvet’s exquisite touch against my skin, and quietly chased back the narrative of my dream. Hours or minutes later – or maybe only seconds, who knows the time-collapsing power of REM sleep? – I became aware that Ann was standing over me, beside me, by the bed. The scouring smell of ammonia filled the air, burning my nostrils and throat.

‘Ants.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve got ants. Everywhere. All over the ceiling downstairs. Rivers of them.’

‘You’re kidding.’

I didn’t want to go downstairs and see snake trails of ants winding out of light sockets and over the walls. I didn’t want to get the step-ladder and wipe them up, constantly rinsing the cloth of ant bodies, picking them off, sticky and dark like chocolate hail. I must have groaned, because Ann said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve done it.’

‘Really?’

‘I was awake.’

I pushed myself up in the bed. The ammonia was waking me up and knocking me out all at once. ‘Can you open a window?’

She did. A finger of cold air came through the room. I asked Ann whether she wasn’t tired now. She was, she said, but she didn’t get back into bed, or even sit down. Creakily, my knees sore from the evening’s run with Andy, I swung out of bed – ah, wincing as my right knee took my weight for a second – and limped across the landing to run her a bath.

‘You’re the loveliest boyfriend I ever had,’ she said as the bathroom filled with steam.

I liked being called boyfriend, not husband: it nicely balanced out that middle-aged knee. ‘You’re no slouch yourself,’ I said, taking the yellow rubber gloves from her hands. ‘You shouldn’t be climbing ladders. You probably shouldn’t use that cleaner either.’

She lowered herself carefully into the hot water. I stared at her round belly, the thick blue veins running down her breasts, the enlarged, darkened nipples. What must it feel like to have your body play host to an alien force? Of course she had wanted the baby, it wasn’t as though she had been invaded. But nevertheless – how odd to feel the growth and movement inside you of a creature that feeds off your body, that is about to rule every aspect of your life but at this moment in time doesn’t really exist.

I was about to go back to bed when Ann started to tell me about the ants. She had got up for a drink of water and remembered that she had to take one of her herbal remedies, the hippie stuff she had for the pregnancy, so went downstairs. She knew something was wrong as soon as she turned on the kitchen light. It was the feeling, she said, of being on a boat waiting to leave dock, and the boat alongside pulls out so you have the uncanny sensation that you’re moving backwards when you should be moving forwards, yet you’re really not moving at all. A sort of peripheral crawl. Slowly, she looked up. There were cracks in the ceiling, fresh black cracks scored diagonally through the plaster. Repair work: she felt the familiar lurch of money worry in her heart, then ducked her head, so dizzy from craning her neck it seemed the cracks were wriggling. A deep breath and another look confirmed it. They were on the move.

She had done a brilliant job. The ceiling gleamed in streaks with the swipe of her cloth and downstairs smelled of bleach and artificial pine, which made me gag, but there was not the smeared trace of a single ant. I carried the step-ladder back outside. The air was sharp against my thin T-shirt, the courtyard full of familiar shadows. I breathed deeply. Ants inside for the winter, a rat decomposing in the walls, the wrong kinds of creatures seeking haven in our house. Tomorrow I would set bait, lay traps, scour out sink pipes. On the way back inside my hands brushed against the rough leaves of the potted lemon geranium, and it was that verbena-tea scent, sweet and clean, that I took with me back upstairs. Ann had fallen asleep in the bath.

We found some clever plug-in devices to keep rodents away. They emit a high-pitched sound, too high a frequency for the human ear, but just right to send little rats and mice running mad. Ann laughed at the vision of them packing their suitcases and huffing down the street, paws over their ears, to a quieter neighbourhood. We did worry that the constant tone of a sound we couldn’t hear might drive us unknowingly insane. And what about the baby? Ann wondered, but I reminded her what the midwife had said about the blood rushing round the womb being as loud as a vacuum cleaner. This didn’t stop her trying to brainwash the baby with Mozart, prematurely turn him into a giggling twerp in a periwig and breeches. She drifted further and further down the yew-hedge maze of witchery, brewing up vile-smelling pots of what looked like moss, making faces like a disgusted three-year-old between each bitter sip.

‘Why do you do it?’ I asked her, ‘can’t you just take a vitamin?’

She shook her head, her chin puckered. ‘Better this way,’ she said.

Kate had prescribed drops of this and that to go under her tongue, oils to rub into her skin and different fruited incense cones to burn at various times of the day. The dreamcatcher was the last straw. Ann hung it in our bedroom window, a manky little feather thing with shells and beads hanging off it. I found her downstairs, cross-legged on the living room floor, the stereo headphones clamped either side of her belly, and dangled it like a dead canary in her face. It was, she told me, for keeping out bad spirits.

‘Jesus Christ, it’s like living with Stevie bloody Nicks,’ I said, ‘only without the cocaine, which would be more fun.’

‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll keep it in the bathroom. You’re only worried about what the neighbours think.’

‘That is so untrue,’ I laughed, ‘I despise our neighbours, it’s what Andy and Tonia will think that worries me.’

Then, as though she was a picture focusing and revealing itself, I saw her, really saw her there with the Mickey Mouse-size headphones over the baby bump, and asked her what on earth she was doing.

‘I knew you’d freak out,’ she said, ‘I’m playing the baby some Debussy.’

I didn’t know we even owned any Debussy. Debussy, apparently, was the thing these days. She had gone out and bought it specially. For the baby, which probably didn’t yet have ears. I did, at least, have the wit to know that most of our bickering on baby-related topics was a way of dealing with fear. In my case, the entirely rational and prescient fear that once the baby was born, Ann and I, as we knew each other, would cease to exist. We didn’t know then that it was a boy but Ann always, perhaps with some premonition (to use her New Age language), called the baby ‘he’. He would come between us, be the primary man in Ann’s life, a defenceless, even smaller, version of me, on whom Ann could practise all her powers of loving and control. It would be the baby she lay next to, the baby who took her breast, the baby in whose ear she whispered.

Bridget was already there, sitting at a table for two by the wall, when I got to the bar in Exmouth Market. I kissed her hello on both cheeks and ordered a glass of red wine from the waitress. On the bus in I’d had no idea why she’d wanted to see me, but now it was clear it wasn’t to have a laugh over old times.

‘You look well.’

‘Thank you. So do you.’ She looked down at the table, leaking tears. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s OK.’

We waited for her to compose herself. She shook her head a little and smiled brightly up at me. ‘I heard you’re having a baby.’ The end of the sentence tailed off; she just mouthed the word, like ‘cancer’ or ‘herpes’; it would have been funny if she hadn’t been trying so hard to keep her tears under control.

I nodded, but she had looked away again. ‘Yes.’ I stood to intercept the waitress and take our wine glasses before she got too close to the table. Bridget was rummaging in her bag for a tissue. ‘Are you all right?’

She laughed. ‘“You look well,” that means fat, doesn’t it, means I’ve put on weight.’

‘Oh Jesus, Bridge, I thought we’d broken up. I don’t have to walk into these gin traps any more.’ It was reflex, flirting with her, involuntary.

‘Don’t worry. I have gained weight, I don’t care.’

‘You’re beautiful.’

‘So bloody masochistic. Oh fuck, I shouldn’t have called you. I just have’ – she wobbled again, everything wavering – ‘such regrets, such terrible regrets.’

‘Bridget.’ I reached across the table for her hands but she drew them away into her lap. ‘You were happy.’

‘I am, I have been – why didn’t you call me? I had to hear it from Sam.’ Dead Martin’s partner. Ann must have bumped into him; he’d have raced to the phone to tell Bridget, he was cruel that way.

‘Well, it’s been so long since we saw each other.’

Her words ran over mine. ‘I had that abortion.’ Oh, fuck. Here it was. ‘You agreed.’

One for the road after we broke up, just before I met Ann. Bridget had been pregnant at Martin’s funeral and told me in a stony phone conversation the next day, after I had woken with my mind filled with Ann. Had I been too hasty, to ready to encourage her to have the termination? Now she was telling me she would have to have a hysterectomy, that she had endometriosis, one of the only treatments for which was to see a pregnancy through to term. I thought of Ann and the persistent fibroid that showed up on that early scan, but which the baby had, as promised, eclipsed in size. This wasn’t my domain, these fleshy inner workings. Even the wine had a bloody aftertaste. How to say to her, I’m sorry? What difference would sorry make? At the next table a group of young women burst into laughter.

‘What about John?’ They lived together, I knew; we had exchanged change of address emails.

But now he had moved out. ‘Every month, the pressure.’

I rubbed my eyes. Had she really expected to get pregnant with John? She had always, it seemed, been old, and now she must be pushing fifty. Sexy still, but old, and if she were to have a baby she’d just about qualify for a Sun headline, like those wrinkled long-haired Italian crones whom doctors were always impregnating.

‘I’m so sorry.’ This was easier. Sorry about, not sorry for. She let me take her hand. Bridget, so tough and raw. Looking at her there, older, her chic haircut more grey than blonde, lines running between her nose and mouth, I wondered whether we could have made it work if I hadn’t been so stupid as to be scared of her. Whatever inadequacies she made me conscious of I had forgotten. Others, of course, had taken their place.

I rang Ann. She answered from my study, my computer, trying to source some cheap wax and clay, she told me; she was out of materials and had plans for more figure work.

‘I thought you were coming home to watch that new drama of Simon’s.’

A one-off play he had made before returning to Casualty. What a guy. ‘Can you tape it?’

‘It finished an hour ago. Where are you?’

‘Just going to see Bridget into a cab.’

‘I’ll probably be asleep.’

We stood on Rosebery Ave. for a long time, talking sporadically. In the silences I inched closer towards her. At the bar, beneath the table, our legs had pressed against the other’s, neither of us acknowledging the touch, a couple of people sitting in a cauldron and pretending the fire underneath it is not lit, whistling while behind the bushes cannibals sharpen their knives. She was shocked to hear about the mugging, though had her own robbery story to counter with. Her architecture practice had been burgled twice in the past year, mostly for computers. She’d taken to carrying her work around with her all the time. It was going well, she told me, while we waited on the street, in the tone of someone who had arrived at success and discovered it wasn’t what she cared about. She’d won an award.

‘Bridget, that’s wonderful.’

‘Thank you.’

She held my gaze. Everything unsaid ran between us, a current I badly wanted to give in to. My coat was around her shoulders. I felt deeply connected to her; we had been through something painful together, though admittedly the pain had been all hers. The night was still and quiet, and the few taxis that cruised past had passengers already. We decided to walk towards Angel. As we were about to cross St John Street Bridget slid her arm through mine. My right foot was out in the road – I had mentally already crossed it. I stepped back to the kerb and pressed against her. Both her arms were around my waist now. Her face was hidden against my chest. I lifted her chin to see her in the tawny London light that passed for darkness. She stared at me and blinked slowly. We were drunk. I half laughed and blew out a small gust of breath. ‘My God,’ I remember saying before I kissed her. ‘I can’t believe I’m going to do this.’ Her mouth was waiting for me but first I pushed her collar aside, put my mouth to her neck, felt the beautiful hot pulse beneath the skin. ‘Ah,’ she breathed, just as she had always done.

On kissing Bridget I was swept with relief. Yes, the weaselly line that as she was my ex this didn’t really count as cheating slipped into my mind, but was quickly flicked away. There was nothing to excuse this, nothing to justify it. It had been years since I’d given Bridget any real thought; after meeting Ann I’d never yearned for her. An enormous weight, the burden of fidelity, lifted from me.

‘You were such a hopeless boy,’ she said to me. ‘Such a boy, broke all the time and always trying to get another job and now you own a house, you’re going to be a father.’ Her hands were in my hair.

‘I’m no different, Bridge. Nothing real has changed.’

Unbalanced together we staggered backwards, away from the road, to the display window of a posh butcher’s shop. Crazily the liberation of kissing Bridget was all tied up in euphoria at being out of fucking cunting Hackney, away from nasty streets and smelly shops and hateful littering people. There was more of the same everywhere in London, this I knew, but had forgotten how necessary it was to go regularly to the cleaner places, where there was no dog shit and people spat less. The tiles on the butcher’s shop were smooth and clean under my hand as I pressed my body right into hers. God it was familiar, it had been eight years since I’d kissed her, she must be forty-seven, poor Bridge, she would never have a baby and yet here she was entirely womanly, her soft waist curving in, her hips lifting up towards me. Her neck led unimpeded to that hollow at the base of her skull, no mass of hair to negotiate, only Bridget’s beautiful, queenly head. I had turned her around and had my hands on her ribcage, I was kissing her neck and my fingers made out the curved wire of her bra. One of my legs was pinned between hers. If there’d been a hotel room – a bed – the back seat of a car … My hand pushed her skirt up her legs, shifted the fabric aside, felt the heat between her legs. In the close reflection of the shop window I watched the side of her face, her closed eyes above the square shoulder of my winter coat. She twisted again to face me, her breath coming quickly, and our glazed eyes locked together.

‘We have to stop,’ I said.

The last thing she said to me as she was getting into the taxi was, ‘You see who this has made me become? I never would have done this before.’

‘It’s all right,’ I told her. ‘Don’t feel bad.’

She sank back into the seat and I lost sight of her.

As I unlocked the front door of my house, the elation of betrayal dispersed like steam. I stood for a long time under the shower before climbing into the bed where Ann was sleeping. The wine and tiredness blanketed my shame but it was all waiting there for me in the morning. Ann was dressed and ready for work when I woke. She must have smelled the booze, and looked at me with amusement.

‘How was your ex?’

‘Oh, she’s not in very good shape.’ Ann pulled the blinds. Light came into the room like oxygen. ‘She’s got to have an operation.’

‘Poor her.’

Non-committal. She knew I didn’t want to start pleading Bridget’s case, but it was genuinely painful and I wanted Ann to understand this, to bring it into focus: ‘A hysterectomy.’

‘She doesn’t have any children?’

‘No.’

‘That’s awful.’

Yes it was. But then I wondered, after Ann had kissed me goodbye and chucked a packet of Nurofen on the bed, whether it wasn’t somehow Bridget’s fault. She had had years in which to have children, especially with that guy she lived with before we met. She just hadn’t wanted them. And now, although it had probably been too late for some time, she could view her life through the lens of mine and even make me feel subtly guilty about her problems, as though I had put the disease in her womb. I couldn’t believe that just hours before I had felt like the executioner myself of that unwanted pregnancy, a pregnancy she only told me about once she’d decided to end it, in a procedure she didn’t even want me coming along to. She had rejected my offer to hold her hand, my offer to pay for her to go private (she knew I didn’t have the money but I’d have found it somewhere, I would, I would). I had kept the news from Ann, who had that minute walked into my life. And now it was my fault all over again. Well I would not take the blame.

Ann had left the computer on all night, and its sick starter-motor hum contributed to the buzzing in my head. The screen displayed a web page, black with green text and a heading in the style of dripping blood. Clicking back through Google revealed that she had typed in the search words ‘ghost house Hackney’. Fuck’s sake. I stabbed the off button without saving anything. A ticklish, erotic shiver ran through me. If Bridget was here now … Oh, you fucking fucking fuckwit, Tom, you lightweight fucking idiot. Without even meaning to I had crossed a line that could not be uncrossed. The promise of total faithfulness I made to Ann on our wedding day was broken, and so lightly. This was the behaviour of a careless twenty-four-year-old, not a man soon to be a father, a man who loved his wife.

‘Ghost house Hackney’: those three words had begun to sum up where we lived. Asked to confirm my address on the phone to BT or the gas company I felt tempted to utter them: ‘Ghost house Hackney, down the lane from Hangman’s Alley, opposite Bluebeard’s Cave, E9.’ You’ll notice that ghosts generally appear in East London, where the locals are more credible. Ooh, apples and pears I seen the headless lady – or the sinister dead after-hours drinkers, howling Blitz victims, any number of murdered infants. The East Enders are forever choking their babies and hiffing them out of windows. And famous people never get any rest in the afterlife. Churchill, Pope, Anne Boleyn and assorted reputable vicars are kept eternally busy gliding over the uneven footpaths of London, along with Dr Crippen and a couple of whores murdered by Jack the Ripper. Not Jack himself though, probably because he was in fact the Marquess of Salisbury disguised as Queen Victoria, or whatever is the current wisdom. Ghosts crawl over this landscape like termites on a rock.

London as a restless cemetery: it’s this kind of sentimentality that reduces great cities to theme parks, politics to jingoism, and every girl in a nightgown to a victim on a flight of stairs. It was hard to believe that Ann, who had a finely honed sense of the ridiculous, was even interested in this stuff, website after website devoted to superstition and gossip. I tackled her about it that night, the night after I kissed Bridget. Once my hangover had lifted my mood that day was triumphant. As though pheromones were in the air, Cheryl had phoned me with the news that Rosemary wanted to see the vampire script again, once I had finished this current pass at it. If the universe, in Tonia’s parlance, was teaching me anything, it was that illicit snogging is good for your mojo. Ann raced home and dropped her bag heavily on the hall floor, flourished a bottle of champagne.

‘You’re going to make it work, Tom, she’s going to be all over this script, she’s going to want to fuck it.’ How radiant she looked, how unsuspecting!

‘She’s only said she’ll look at it. You can look at a dog turd on the street.’

‘You can look at the fucking Taj Mahal.’

I followed her peachy body up the stairs, we barely made it to the bed. Afterwards we opened the bottle, drank out of the bathroom mug, naked in the unlit room. When you’re drinking with a pregnant woman you’ve got to pull more than your weight – life is full of these hardships. I felt all-powerful, in on a cosmic joke.

‘What’s this about ghost house Hackney, Ann? You can’t be serious.’

‘Why not?’

I laughed, and reached for her ass again.

‘I mean it,’ she said, pulling the sheets up, shifting away. ‘Why shouldn’t there be forces we can’t see? Why restrict yourself?’

‘It’s all so clichéd – slime down the walls, glowing balls of fire, I mean, come on, most people on those websites who claim to have haunted homes just want to be rehoused by the council.’

‘You’re such a fucking snob.’

‘OK. It’s true. But for good reasons.’

‘Like what you should do with your serviette after you’ve eaten? Your fucking napkin?’

‘How did we get on to this? I don’t care about that stuff. That’s my mother’s shit. So what if you call the living room the lounge, I don’t care!’

‘You notice. You do care. You cringe inside.’

‘I do not! Why are we talking about this?’

‘Because you are so closed off. Your world is tiny, this tiny little garden gnome world.’

‘Ann, stop it …’ I tried to laugh.

‘Only you can be right, you and all those—’ She spat a frustrated growl.

‘All those who?’

‘You thin men.’

There was hate in her voice. The room, the glow of sex, everything was turned inside out. This had somehow to be about last night. I scrambled for my bearings. Bridget must have phoned Ann. She knew where she worked. But why wasn’t Ann asking me head on? ‘Look. Maybe I am a snob. There are worse things to be. Are you seriously telling me you believe in ghosts?’

‘Don’t you? You’re the one who writes vampire-slasher films.’

‘For. Idiots.’ My voice was loud. I turned the light on. She looked ugly.

‘That is your problem, Tom, you think everyone else is a moron.’

‘Only when they are! Have you read any of those so-called sightings? The ghost of a bear? The smiling red-haired man? You’ve even got a ghost of your monk, Rahere, the guy your bloody chemo ward’s named after. Or,’ I remembered a good one, and hunched over, running a finger across my neck, ‘a small man with a slit throat?’ I laughed. ‘People who think they see kangaroo footprints in Hyde Park! The ghost kangaroo of London, you seen it lately? Hear it boinging in the night?’

‘You know what, fuck you.’

It took me little time to apologise. When hurtful things were said we were quick to clear the air, each truly sorry to wound the other and neither of us wanting to sulk. Apologies and forgiveness came easily, and the mood that followed was always light, pure, as though a window had been opened. Perhaps we brushed aside our conflicts faster than we should have, aware of a gap between us too appallingly large to peer down into. That’s hindsight, which is not always the most generous lens through which to remember love. Kinder to say we were not grudge bearers, we were not children; fallible, of course, but gentle on the whole.

The champagne bottle was empty. Silently we dressed and went downstairs. I talked about God knows what, as if nothing was the matter, made us dinner and behaved in a generally saintly fashion (’controlling’, my remorseful present self cries out, ‘wilfully blind and controlling’); we watched a little Newsnight and then I went up to bed.

I was almost asleep when I felt Ann slide in beside me. At this stage in the pregnancy she had taken to sleeping in a fortress of pillows: under the bump, between her knees, under her ankles – it was like being in bed with the Michelin man and about as sexy. I heard the pillows gently thudding one by one to the floor. Ann’s body felt velvety and generously curved without the frightening visuals of the swollen belly. Her thighs were squishier than before. I scratched the backs of her calves with the top of my fingernails. She wore a bra, a satin cantilevered thing that thrust her breasts up into pornographic handfuls. I pulled at them so they spilled over the bra cup, rubbing my thumbs along the nipples which were silky as water, lightly and then harder until she made a sound. In the pitch dark of our room behind the blackout blinds, we slowly fucked. I bit her earlobe. She put my fingers in her mouth.

When I got out of the shower in the morning she was standing there wearing a creamy-gold slip in the steam, examining the smudged finger marks on her chest and thighs, the red spots on her bony knees. I kissed the side of her throat. If I could have stayed there for ever I would have, my mouth lying against the damp skin, the pure line of her collarbone, her hair falling over me, protecting me. All manner of secrets could have been whispered into the brave, delicate column of her neck. Ann’s pulse throbbed.

‘I love you,’ I said.

We looked at each other through a porthole I rubbed in the mirror; she began to brush her hair, a mermaid, siren from another world.

‘Brute,’ she said, with some satisfaction.

‘Talentless brute,’ I reminded her.

She laughed. ‘Yes. Although you’re not a bad fuck.’

‘Watch it, while you’re holding that hairbrush.’

‘Get out.’ She pushed me. I left the door open a crack and perched on the stairs, not wanting to be too far from her. ‘Oh God, I’m so old to have a baby,’ Ann moaned from the bathroom in that half talking to herself, half talking to me voice that married people use. Without spying through the gap in the door I could tell by that voice that she was attacking her grey hairs with the tweezers. There were hardly any – it was a vain gesture that mattered only to Ann. I loved that voice, I loved hearing Ann’s inner thoughts as they rose gently to the surface, a ribbon of intimate words floating out of her mouth on the bathroom steam and through the door to me, where I opportunistically sat, ostensibly waiting to clean my teeth but really living for this moment.