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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

“Well. What’s yer names?”

“I’m Bridg. This is Emma.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ha.”

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

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

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

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

“And you don’t go school in Wolvie.”

“No? Don’t I?”

“No, you do not.”

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

“Bletchley’s butters.”

“Lol. Ha ha.”

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

“You wasn’t. Weren’t.”

“Sorry.”

“Hey mate, don’t worry about it.”

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

“Not too long nah.”

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

“London yeah?”

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

“Aha. You’ve thought it all out.”

“And you? What’s your plan then?”

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

“You already look like one.”

“Yeah? Aha. How’s this?”

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

“Less than my pension.”

“And?”

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

“I’m seventeen.”

“You should learn to drive.”

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

“There’s always an excuse.”

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get that one,” he said.

“I’m tryna get that one, stop.”

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

“Just don’t let go of my hair.”

“You’ve got it.”

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

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

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

He whispered, “Wait—” and paused.

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

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

“Don’t get anything on my clothes.”

“I’m not. God fuck yes Emma.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re wasted. You’re just pissed.”

“I’m honest.”

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

“I don’t think he planned on dying.”

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

“I don’t mind, honestly.”

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

“Charming.”

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

*

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

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

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

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

“Well, thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Getting that way, looks like.”

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m already on my way to drunk.”

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

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

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

He leaned forward. “You’re dangerous.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh no, pitbulls are very popular.”

“Is it the hair?”

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

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

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

*

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

“What are you doing?” she said.

“What d’you mean what am I doing?”

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

*

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

*

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

Throughout the workout, Charlotte stared at him.

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

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

“Sorry, who are we talking about?”

Yet he knew, didn’t he?

“Tilly.”

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

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

“Tilly’s your daughter?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you doing?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s fine,” Liam said.

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“Yesterday! Charlotte. Surely you remember.”

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

“That doesn’t matter.”

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

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

“What optics?”

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

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

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

“They should listen to reality.”

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

“So? Truth matters too, Doug.”

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

“And are you gonna?”

“Well what choice do I have?”

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

“I don’t want to.”

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

“Well. Yes, I am? That is my job.”

“Yeah. Just following orders.”

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

“Whatever man.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s no way you’re sorry.”

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

*

For some weeks he began to feel despair.

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

“Shocking, these lockdowns.”

“I know.”

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

“They’re not, no.”

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

“I know.”

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

“Sorry, I—”

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

“Bridg—”

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ve got it on the carpet, Liam.”

“He’s a mess Nan.”

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

“Pisshead,” Em said.

“I’m sorry.”

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

“I’m not doing well,” he said.

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

“I’m sorry.”

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

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

“But to stop it before it gets worse?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

* * * * *

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

““Sunset style”?” said Poppy.

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

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

“Here good?” she said.

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

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

“We need to wait for the sunset.”

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

“Ten. Maybe fifteen?”

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

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

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

“Is he gonna like—”

“Jay, don’t—”

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

“We’ve got time. He’ll move.”

“What is he even doing?”

“He’s just looking.”

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

“It hasn’t been that long.”

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

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

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

“Oh my God,” Poppy said in a burst.

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

“It’s not 999 here.”

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

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

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

“Wait. Emergency dial. It’s calling.”

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

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

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

*

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

“Dead from a fall?”

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

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

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

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

“It’s fine. We have five pics.”

“Not the full shot list.”

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

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

“We’ll make more—”

“Fuck it I’m ringing Steven.”

“Go ahead. It’s chill—”

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

“I really don’t care by the way.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you doing?”

“Calling Steven back.”

“Fuck sake.”

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

Steven said, “All good. Ya.”

Jay said, “So look, Steven—”

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

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

“Is that Poppy, Poppy, I get that.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Move him a bit? What the fuck?”

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

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

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

“We’ve fucked it Poppy.”

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

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

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Poppy stop, give me my phone back.”

“I’m hanging up on you now, Steven.”

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

“Well you sure fucked that mate.”

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

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

“Okay mate.”

“Stop.”

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

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

“No, of you, Steven, me.”

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

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

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

“I meant me.”

“You’re not dead.”

“Not literally, no.”

“Don’t get you.”

“You’re misunderstanding me intentionally, Jay.”

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

“Gladly.”

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

“Oh fuck off. Fuck off.”

*

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

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

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

Poppy was amazed. “Split up? What?”

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

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

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

“We have one row and—”

“It’s nothing to do with the row—”

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

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

“Are you serious? Are you joking?”

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

“Yes.”

“Then you can’t be honest with me.”

“No, I honestly do. I love you, Jay?”

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

“Do you love me?”

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

“Well it’s not about that—”

“Do you? Have you ever?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fuck, sorry.”

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

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

“I feel sick, no, no.”

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

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

*

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

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

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

“They can’t die.”

“They have for me.”

“You can’t not have a past anymore.”

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

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

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

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

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

“To say it like this though.”

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

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

*

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

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

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

“You’re Poppy and Jay.”

“Nah,” Jay said.

Poppy was silent.

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

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

“You’re them. I love you guys.”

“What’s your name?”

“Perdita.”

“Great name.”

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can’t believe it.”

“Ya. He’s eighteen.”

“Wow.”

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

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

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

“No. Deleted Instagram.”

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

“Lily?”

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

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

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

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

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

“And who’s this?”

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

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

“I know. She likes you.”

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

“Well I should probably be getting on.”

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

“Thanks. I’ll consider it.”

“See you.”

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

*

*

*

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“Is that inventable?”

“You know what I’m saying Tommy.”

“Googling. Someone called Sombrero.”

“Latino?”

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

“Are we gonna book this holiday?”

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

“It’s normal to book holidays.”

“I know it is. But this many?”

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

“Kinda. But life’s also life life.”

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

“Which things?”

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

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

“But not in a holiday sort of way.”

II

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

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

“Chemical-y—”

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

“I smell clean.”

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

“It’s not exciting, though.”

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

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

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

“To you.”

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

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

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

“Whatever.”

“Way too much brain in your head.”

“Okay.”

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

“I’m trapped in myself.”

“Meaning? What’s that mean?”

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

“You sort of have abs.”

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

“Same end result.”

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

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

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

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

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

“But they are tanned.”

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

“My genes?”

“Well yeah.”

“No. Have you?”

“Have I done your Find My Past?”

“Idiot. Have you done yours?”

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

“How come you’re Catholic then?”

“Personal choice.”

“Are your mum and dad fine with that?”

“They’re not religious.”

“Well. The point is, you could gym.”

“What? We’re jumping back to that?”

“I’m saying, to get jacked.”

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

“You look good too.”

“Look at you though. Athletic genes.”

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

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

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

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

“I think Schwarzenegger is a Catholic.”

“Outlier.”

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

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

“I’m not a “himbo”, Edward.”

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

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

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

“Whatever.”

“Now you’re whatevering me, Tommy?”

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

“You’re not dumb.”

“Not intelligent, then.”

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

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

“Okay then.”

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

“The booking’s an hour from now.”

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

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

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

“Well, we’d need clothes first, but—”

“Emotionally.”

“I’m a chameleon. I can be happy.”

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

III

“No, Edward.”

“Why not?”

“It looks stupid.”

“It’s Le Corbusier.”

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

“It cost me a grand.”

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

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

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

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

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

“It is something from eighty years ago.”

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

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

“Dying young, homophobia, all that.”

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

“I do own this flat.”

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

“Let’s make out. Come on.”

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

“Let’s make out.”

“No Tommy.”

“Why no?”

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

“My boyfriend.”

“Yes, well.”

“You can’t even say that.”

“Boyfriend. Content?”

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

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

“We’re talking about our life.”

“Dissecting. Feels like that, sometimes.”

“In what possible way?”

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

“I am a boy.”

“You own a flat.”

“It’s a mindset.”

“Owning a flat?”

“Being a boy, being young.”

“I’m joking.”

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

“Please stop saying things.”

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

“For god’s sake. What?”

“I hate your chair.”

IV

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

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

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

“Well I don’t—”

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

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

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

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

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

“Well it what?”

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

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

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

“I do care.”

“You do care—but you pretend or don’t show that you do.”

“Okay, let me force out some tears. Look, I’m crying. I’m squeezing my tear ducts. Tears will come, look.”

“Please stop that. Please.”

“You wanted me crying, here we are.”

“Please stop doing things to your eyeballs, Edward.”

“It’s a manifested, a concretised version of what we’ve just been saying. You want me to cry. I’m not crying. So I will obey the great Tommy, and cry on command.”

“I wanted me cheating on you to bring us closer together.”

“You believed your cheating on me would bring us closer together? See what I mean about paradoxes? You’re mentally ill.”

“I’m not sure I believed it.”

“Then what then?”

“I’m saying I desired it.”

“I do not understand.”

“God can you just get your head out your arse? For someone so intelligent—. I’m saying that maybe a shock to the system would do us good, you’d show emotions, we’d be able to talk about your fears I’d leave you—which will never, ever happen, by the way. We’d talk about that and you’d get more comfortable with me simply existing and not be terrified there’s going to be a Tommy-sized hole in your life out of nowhere. Do you get me?”

“No, not really. No.”

“Just—God.”

“Well so here’s my take: you said you’ve been pushed out of your love for me. You say you cheated for that reason. Now you also say, a similar but different thing, that you’ve cheated because you essentially do love me and want to love me more. Now in neither of these scenarios is cheating an act of love. I sort of believe that you wanted to just cause some sort of lightning-strike fuck-the-world sort of crashing down of things, which might mean we’d reassess, reevaluate our relationship. But I’m supposed to believe you want to cheat on me again because I’m not visibly sad enough that your bizarre plan hasn’t worked? Rather, Occam’s Razor, I think you just want to shag him again.”

“Well, no, because I was thinking of someone else.”

V

“Hi. Joe?”

“Nice to meet you, Edward.”

“Haha, never know whether to go in for the handshake or the hug first time—”

“Yeah I know right.”

“Nice place.”

“You think so?”

“Well, yeah, I’ve never been here though, but I don’t quite know why because I actually used to live in the area with my ex.”

“Right into the deep end.”

“Sorry. Can you tell I haven’t dated in a while?”

“No, it’s funny. It’s cute.”

“So Joe you said you’re, what was it, industrial chemist?”

“Yeah exactly.”

“I love that shirt on you by the way.”

“Aw. Thanks.”

“So what does industrial chemist mean?”

“I do the ice cream flavours.”

“Just the flavours?”

“Oh. Yeah. Just the flavours. Someone else does texture.”

“I’d’ve thought they’d’ve been sort of, part and parcel, you know? Like if you edited the flavour component it might change the texture?”

“Well it’s all syrups, which are stabilised, so it doesn’t really, it doesn’t really matter to us.”

“I find that banana ice cream is underrated. Like, rare.”

“Yeah, banana’s not popular.”

“Yet people love eating bananas. Quintessential fruit. Coincidentally: my nickname.”

“Haha. Yeah.”

“I’ve also never seen watermelon ice cream. Is that just me? Is there such a thing?”

“Well, it’s that watermelon is actually not that flavourful. Not that distinct a flavour note really.”

“No? I think it is. I think it has that sweet, slightly vomity taste? It’s like if sick tasted amazing.”

“Hi gents, do you know what you’re thinking of ordering?”

“Oh, sorry, we haven’t even had a look.”

“No worries. I’ll give you a couple mins.”

“Sorry Joe. Talking about vomit when we’re about to eat.”

“It’s fine.”

“I guess it’s nice to speak to someone who has a real job, you know? “Industrial chemist.” That’s so utterly a job—a job job. My ex was a PT who did crypto on the side. Could you think of a more basic combo? It’s like, hello, it’s for you, Dubai calling. Right? So he took care of himself and did fake tans and such, not in a repulsive way but in a more like a tasteful sort of way. Took, I said, well, takes, he’s not dead, right. But can you imagine the convos we had to have? Oh, I have this client, he’s a bit delusional about how much he can bench. Oh, I’m going to a crypto conference to go and scam some more teenagers. Not literally that, but that adjacent. You know?”

“Yeah. Must’ve been hard.”

“Yeah, it was hard. It was like, here’s this person I’ve fallen in love with despite it all, someone so totally unalike me—perhaps like if you took a wax cast of me, he’d be the negative, the opposite, every single quality the opposite of mine. He hated anything more than a year old. Clothes. Furniture. He wanted a glass box for a flat. And I want someone who can appreciate the Victorians, you know?”

“Yeah. So do you know what you wanna order—?”

“Oh, sorry, haven’t had a chance to look. But so see, industrial chemistry is a breath of fucking—because we lived together, put our record collections together, metaphorically, neither of us owning records or a record player—and so I come home and daily get to hear about the travails of the local oldies at the David Lloyd gym. And if I should ever have complained—woe betide. Sorry. I’m going on.”

“It’s okay.”

“So have they ever done a custard ice cream? I feel like that’s a gap in the market.”

VI

“Thanks for having this coffee, Tommy.”

“Well of course.”

“It’s just that, perhaps you might feel the same, but it’s been a weird six months.”

“It has.”

“For various reasons.”

“Yes. For various reasons.”

“I’ve been dating. Not well. One of them called me Eddie.”

“Ah.”

“I presume you have too?”

“No, actually.”

“No?”

“No, I haven’t seen anyone.”

“Hm.”

“I do think about you.”

“I would’ve thought given that you were keen to see other guys, not in a getting with way but in a going out with way, that you might’ve been dating.”

“Maybe. I dunno. Some time by myself, single, not dating, I felt might be a good thing to do.”

“I get you.”

“Latte?”

“Oh mine thanks.”

“And here’s the espresso.”

“Cheers.”

“So well all of my dating has been unmitigated cringe. I mean. Am I out of practice? Is more expected of me because of my age compared to theirs?—they’ve all been twenty, twenty-two. How was your twenty-fifth by the way?”

“Nice thanks. Yeah, nice. It felt weird without you being there.”

“It felt weird not being there Tommy. I mean, that’s the funny thing about dates, birthdays—they’re like all these sort of appointments in your head to keep, only the person might be out of your life, or have passed away, or have been long forgotten and not in contact. Nevertheless. Still in the diary. Still up on the horizon, coming into view. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“So I wanted to see you because I wanted to have a difficult conversation.”

“Go on. You can be open with me.”

“Thank you. Well, so, it’s sort of—I don’t really know how to put it into words. I’ll try. I wondered if you would accept my apology, and perhaps offer me an apology, for parity, and that we could give it another go? I mean, literally try getting back together. Not immediately. Dating first. Not being ‘boyfriends’ straight off the bat.”

“I think we could. Yeah, I think we could try that. It would almost be romantic to try it blank slate.”

“Tabula rasa, yeah.”

“You are still a pretentious clown.”

“A learned clown. A scholarly clown.”

“A pretentious clown.”

“I probably am.”

“You said boyfriends.”

“I’m experiencing what they call “growth”.”

“It suits you.”

“Thank you. The moustache suits you.”

“Works in blond?”

“Works in blond. Doubly so. It’s like a Labrador, Aussie, Austin Butler kind of thing.”

“I’ll take it.”

VII

“So Tommy sent me an invitation to his wedding. His wedding with Justin, remember Justin, the guy he first cheated with? Justin.”

“Is his name Justin.”

“Yeah.”

“Just checking. Well Edward—are you gonna go?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t even seen him in person in over two years. There was some weird Zoom call babyshower thing we were both on. I thought his eyes might be looking at my tile on the Zoom. You know, you sort of see their eyes going diagonal and it’s clear they’re not looking at the person who’s speaking? But then, he could have been looking at himself. It was a real riddle. But I’m going to believe it was me, the whole time. So what does that say? And the invite?”

“Edward. Be honest. One hundred percent honest. Are you over him?”

“Can you truly get over someone?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Then no, no I doubt that I am.”

“So won’t going to his wedding be?”

“Difficult? Horrible? Yeah, maybe. Yeah.”

“Don’t go if you don’t want to.”

“It was mature of him to invite me, no?”

“I guess.”

“And I do want him to be happy. He’s a good person.”

“So are you.”

“In my own way—possibly. Not like Tommy is.”

“I think you’re right.”

“About?”

“Your not being over him quite yet.”

VIII

“I cannot even begin to fathom how much of a faff a divorce is.”

“Well. It’s not great.”

“Who gets the dog?”

“I dunno, we haven’t talked about Greta yet, Edward.”

“You should take her. Kidnap her.”

“Kidnap a dog? Can you do that?”

“In the sense of stealing her. Abduct?”

“That’s more for like, dictators or children, no?”

“Get the dog.”

“I do want her.”

“What’s your alternative? I’ll come with you Tommy. We can pretend I’m doing a Deliveroo or something. I’ll wear a balaclava. I’ll rush in, get the dog from him.”

“It’s a nice idea. It might have to stay an idea.”

“What’s your alternative? You chop her in half, King Solomon, half a dog each?”

“Is that what happened? I’m not chopping Greta in half.”

“No, it was a baby in fact, not a dog, and they didn’t bisect it in the end. I think one of them sort of screamed louder. You could try that.”

“I could. I love Greta but I sort of feel as if I want to totally cut my ties from that life.”

“Never leave a dog behind. Never. You can’t go to your grave having done that.”

“I’m leaving my whole life behind.”

“It was only two years. You’re going to recover. You’re not even thirty.”

“Maybe.”

“Let’s get drunk. Please. I’ll make boulevardiers. They’ll facilitate a DMC. You need that.”

“Fuck it. I do.”

“Hooray. I’m salivating.”

“Thanks for staying a friend, Edward.”

“For you, dear Thomas—anything.”

IX

“I am never moving here. Why would people move here?”

“I think they must like it. That must be it.”

“How? How could they possibly?”

“Edward, isn’t that your ex?”

“What? Where?”

“There. Look. On the other platform.”

“Oh my god. It is. Tommy! Oi! Tommy!”

“He can’t hear you.”

“Fuck. It’s been years. We completely fell out of touch.”

“He looks good.”

“He’s always going to look good, I’m afraid.”

“You do too.”

“I am not blessed with youth.”

“You were.”

“I was. You only figure out what good being young’s for when you no longer are. It’s a real fucking shame.”

“What do you think he’s doing here?”

“What do I think he’s doing in Hastings? He’s gay. Isn’t that QED? The seaside attracts us. We’re like seagulls.”

“Want to go over?”

“To see Tommy?”

“Yeah. Seeing that our train’s delayed, why not?”

“Um.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re never nervous. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know if I want to bring all that up again. It felt like a closed door.”

“It still is. He hasn’t seen you.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, who’s that?”

“Whoever he is, he’s hot.”

“I haven’t seen him on Tommy’s Insta.”

“He doesn’t post. I don’t even know if he uses it.”

“New boyfriend?”

“Well, they’re kissing now. That seems pretty logical.”

“I can’t tell with gays.”

“...”

“They’ve now stopped.”

“I know Kirsty, thanks. I have eyes.”

“He’s looking at us. Tommy’s looking. Edward. He sees you. He’s not saying anything.”

“I’m not saying anything either.”

“Why isn’t he reacting?”

“Why aren’t I?”

“Want to go over?”

“I don’t think I do. No. I don’t think I do. It’s best we stay where we are. That’s best, I think.”

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Summer, a scorcher, the dandelions fatigued in the cracks of the convention centre’s car park’s tarmac, the knitted-polyester banner flags—of foxes, dogs, other wolves—unturning in the breezelessness. Something circled overhead—not birds of prey, but those which fed on carcasses. Sasha loved them. She did not have the received, parochial, clichéd hatred or fear for things usually held as fearsome or worthy of scorn. In fact she said, “Beautiful crows Dad.” She said this through her wolf mask. Sasha’s wolf name (“fursona”) was Joseph Stalin.

“Why Joseph Stalin?” Philip had asked. “It might upset some people.”

“The Furry Community is very nonjudgemental.”

“But there might be some people, Russian people or Eastern Europeans or neo-conservatives, who get offended by the name Joseph Stalin.”

She’d been eleven at the time. “Joseph Stalin was a great liberator Dad.”

“Well, in the view of some people, yes, but he’s also associated sort of ineffaceably with the words gulag and purge—”

“Dad, it’s okay. You said to me you’d trust me and it’s up to me what I do in the Community.” She’d been looking up at him, huge-eyed and intelligently naïve. He looked down and placed his hands on her shoulders, like he was giving her a pre-battle pep talk. Her blonde pigtails brushed against his dry fingers.

“If it goes wrong, and it may go wrong—well, if it does, I’m not going to say I told you so. You’re Daddy’s best girl, Sasha. I’m here to look after you. That’s my job in the world.”

“Thanks. Joseph Stalin is a sort of big Russian great wolf.”

“Okay.”

He was quite, quite aware that other than the neurodiverse innocents—like Sasha—for whom ‘being a furry’ was a form of make-believe, dress-up, play, the real-world embodiment of an imaginary friend, there were many other somewhat or very perverted introverts who used the furry persona for, and in, sex. He knew she didn’t know that, and he would never dilute her innocence on the topic. Actually, Philip assumed that, come puberty, she’d begin to see more such content, and it would disabuse her of the whole aesthetic. A rough knock to her innocence and she’d put away the wolf mask. She was enjoying childhood qua childhood: and good for her. Later, as a tangy, perhaps sour, memory, it could work to put in relief other mistakes.

The convention hall was huge, oddly low-ceilinged, carpeted, strip-lit. Its atmosphere was like an endless hotel corridor. There were normal people present, uncostumed. Mothers, fathers, brothers, friends. And there were furries everywhere. They were walking, and in chairs, and drinking huge Pepsis. Some queued for signings or played board games. A few were on all fours. Pleasingly, Philip sensed Sasha holding back. She was tentative, on some cusp.

He hadn’t anticipated the colour. Joseph Stalin was a white wolf with eyes of slush puppy blue. But the rest weren’t grey and white and brown—they were traffic cone orange, hard hat yellow, reflective vest green. There were pink and purple and blue and red and silver and beige furries, and copper and jade and lilac furries, and even a translucent furry. A couple were not furry at all, but had shells or wings. They ranged from Sasha’s size to towering seven-foot beasts. Beneath these he surmised were hulking grimy-haired men in polo shirts, their stomachs like jellies in dome moulds.

She was overwhelmed and Philip held her hand. Her little palm was wet, and, being so small, her form of shaking was vibration. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.” She looked up again with a look that broke his heart. He only needed a happy daughter—that would be fulfilment.

Near them a mother and her own furry child walked into view, she with dark curling luxe hair and he a lemon-coloured cat, maybe a lynx. Over his fursuit he wore a Tottenham football kit. He was uncertain, moving from foot to foot.

“Look at them. He’s not sure either. Shall we go and say hello, Sasha?”

“Joseph Stalin. But yep. Okay.” She squeezed his hand.

“Come on.”

Philip greeted the mother, gratified that to their approach her face relaxed, drawing obvious solace. “Maria,” she said. “This is Gregg.”

“Not Gregg,” he said, furious behind his mask, behind his narrowed amber eyes.

“Sorry. Not Gregg. This is Ajax.”

“Hi Ajax. This is my daughter.”

“I’m Joseph Stalin.”

Maria looked at Philip. He looked back at her. They both smiled; they both laughed. Her laugh was too big for her, gloriously.

“It isn’t funny Dad.”

“It’s a little funny, sweetheart.”

“How old are you?” Sasha asked Gregg.

“Fourteen.”

“I’m twelve and I’m as tall as you.”

“I haven’t had my growth spurt.”

Here Philip manoeuvred the children together, stepping round Sasha. They greeted each other with growls, and they circumnavigated him and Maria, before skipping off into the middle distance.

“Good to keep an eye on them,” Maria said.

“How unwillingly are you here on a scale of one to ten?”

“Hm. Two. Unless unwilling is high. In which case eight. Yourself?”

“I like to let her express herself. It’s nice seeing her happy.”

He realised Maria could’ve taken this as a reproach of her answer. She didn’t. “Thank God you came over.”

“Was it that bad?”

“Well we’ve been stood here on the sidelines for about fifteen minutes. There’s a lot of…adults?”

“A lot of adults.”

“I didn’t know so many people were into it. I’m not totally happy with Gregg doing it, but that’s that. It has its creepy elements. Many of them are here. I just hope when puberty’s fully done a number on him, he’ll have grown out of it.”

“Me too. How’s fourteen?”

“Fourteen’s fourteen. It’s no longer twelve. It’s difficult. And it’s just me to raise him.”

“Ah. Divorced?”

“Widowed.”

“Ah. I’m sorry.”

“Are you married, Philip?”

“No. Divorced.”

“How was that?”

He laughed. Brazenly personal queries at the Furry Convention. Had he reckoned with losing Carol? Maria’s face was set, unmoved. She had the mole-rich delicate type of skin. Her eyes were serious, pressing him to speak. “How was my divorce? Not fucking good, basically. She’s out of Sasha’s life completely now. Her mother, Carol—she’s moved abroad.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yeah. We get by.” He noticed she had moved closer.

“You don’t have to ask me what being widowed was like in case you’re wondering.” She laughed, and it was beautiful. “It was shit. Truly, unrelentingly shit. It’s like getting divorced, only your husband’s dead.”

“We’re being very cheery.”

“The grand meeting of furries has clearly brought it out in us.” She laughed again; he joined her.

Bold and early, in a way divorce had allowed him to be with women, he asked if she’d like to see him again. On that point Maria was coy—for effect, he thought—but she did say, in a flutter of other words, that yes, yes, she would like to see him again, that perhaps they should have a drink out, or, given the kids, would he like to come to dinner and bring Sasha along? Quietly he felt the blow of age: they couldn’t even go for a drink without making preparations for Sasha and Gregg—couldn’t be alone—couldn’t have real intimacy. But he would be seeing her again and hearing that laugh and her hair which, swished, smelled of apples. Children wouldn’t interrupt his smelling her hair.

“Do you find yourself free all the time now you have a daughter?”

“Yes. But also absolutely not free and never free.”

“Exactly. You have no friends and no plans but you don’t seem to have any time.”

“I spend lots of time doing photoshoots of various fursuit looks.”

“Gregg plays badminton. I play so much badminton in the garden. I have no interest in badminton.”

“Badminton is terrible.”

“I know. But he doesn’t make me play football at least.”

Sasha and Gregg came back and, each emboldened by the other, asked for Fantas. They’d noticed a vending machine. As it was a day out, Philip obliged, and as Philip obliged, Maria had to oblige. They were content for five minutes with 330 ml cans, and then immediately hyper. Gregg didn’t seem to be very mature for his age. When he’d been a teenage boy himself Philip wouldn’t’ve been keen on befriending a twelve-year-old girl. Moving his attention from their rapid chatter he looked beyond them into the depths of hall, where furries moved fast and slow, odd in their combinations, like the clownish meeting of different animal species at an oasis.

Seconds later Sasha yelled in pain. “He bit me. He just bit me.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t.”

Maria said, “Gregg, did you just bite Sasha?”

“I’m a lynx. You got too near. I got scared.”

Fatherhood kicked in: unconsciously Philip lifted his daughter into his arms, took her mask off, kissed her, wiped her eyes, which were bravely wobbling but not giving fully into a sob, and dandled her, just as he did when she’d been new into the world. She’d removed her paws and showed him the raw red mark. A deep bite on the hand.

“How dare you bite my daughter.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry okay. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

“Gregg, apologise. Philip, I’m so sorry.” Maria came up to Sasha. “I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”

“Do these masks even have fucking mouth holes?” Philip said.

“His does,” Sasha said, not whimpering now, and faintly imperious, rolling her head over her shoulder to take a look at him down below her.

“Why did you give the biter a mouth hole?”

“He’s not a biter,” Maria said. “I’m sorry. He has never done anything like this before.”

“He’s fourteen. Not four. Fourteen.”

“I know. I know. Gregg. Apologise now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Like you mean it.”

“I’m sorry Sasha I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

“Dad I want to go home, I think.”

“We can go home.”

Maria said, “Look, I’m just, I’m really embarrassed, I wish this hadn’t happened.”

Sasha stayed brave, and then, in the car, cried all the way home.

They did have their dinner, which Sasha resisted attending, but once at their house she was soon mollified, Gregg distracting her with his Xbox. Philip, following them in, checked his teeth in the hallway mirror. He hadn’t seen Gregg’s face before. It had all its features heading towards you, as though under high pressure, the eyes and brow and nose all pushed out intensely. He might become handsome; with a face too long for his boyishness, he wasn’t yet. Maria got him out of their way deftly. Philip only realised then, in her own home, with her son to command rather than indulge, that the widowing had led her through pain into a new bloom, like someone recovering from a near-fatal accident, and that accompanying that bloom—of beauty, surety, even grace—was an undeniable seriousness. She did not always laugh when laughs were there to be had. She could turn in an instant from engaged to distant, appearing to be looking at life through a sometimes-present filter.

Meanwhile she cooked elbowingly, bringing mixing bowls right up into her bosom, and sweeping aside jars of spices. She chopped vegetables with no doubts. To his offer of help she merely held up a hand. Philip was to sit in the stool at the kitchen island and regale her, not waste his energies on the meal. He tried, and found he was nervous. He told so her; she smiled. Above them they could hear the children’s footsteps in Gregg’s room.

After dinner, the second bottle of wine open, Maria was now happy to be bold. She kissed Philip, standing while he was sitting. He liked to see her looking down at him. Her hands ran all over him and he reciprocated. He was shy to linger on her breasts, drifting past them merely, until she gripped his fingers hard and placed them on herself. She was lost to the moment. He hoped to be, but listened out for Xbox sounds upstairs. He felt she might sweep away the remains of the dinner and the cutlery and tablecloth and glasses of wine and fall on him, wild—yet she did not, clearly aware, clearly in control of herself, instead taking him to the downstairs bathroom wallpapered with family photos and going inside and locking the door and having silent panting sex with him against the ceramic of the sink, quickly, but satisfying in its quickness.

Maria became a regular at their house, and, though he was old enough to be left, Gregg always came, because he and Sasha seemed to get on so well. They were off, scheming in certain rooms. Philip loved to cook for a woman whom, by now, so soon, he loved. She adored spice, and, through adventurous cooking, in the space of weeks, he changed the scent character of his Edwardian semi- from laundry tablets to fenugreek, galangal, za’atar, and Szechuan pepper; cardamon, cumin, ras el hanout.

The necessary conversation on her husband and his ex-wife eventually happened, fascinating to have because it revealed so much about what their current arrangement was. Things they wanted were easier to talk of in this post-marriage state, as though what they had learned by being in love the first time was how to be in love the second. Widowhood, divorcehood: these were like graduate degrees in living and loving. Yet he knew they were different states. One was a loss which went on in the world. The other was a loss now absent forever. He might glean new facts of Carol’s life from Facebook; all facts of David were memories only, slowly eroding.

They had frank sex often. They were past showboating or make-believe, and indeed he found the honesty itself a turn-on, because itself vulnerable. Pillowtalk now was “put your hand here”, or “do that again I love when you do that”, and perhaps in foregoing acrobatics they had gained comfort and ease. Casual, sloppy even, aided by a little red wine. They were both forty-five, and at forty-five you didn’t have to envy what you were capable of at eighteen, because you no longer wanted to do it.

On a day of steel skies and sleet, Maria was to move in—but Sasha was against it. She was fourteen herself now and had been moodily resisting everything Philip asked of her. Well, the amalgamation of their households was not something he was asking. It was happening, and he had to spend his afternoon picking up a rented van and lugging wet possessions inside under bleak clouds.

She’d said to him: “I don’t want them. Why can’t we have our life as it is? I like our life as it is. You’re always trying to change things and make things different. You’re so boring. Why would I want to live with them? They’re not Mum. I’m going to go live with Mum.”

“No, but Maria can be like a new mum to you. Mum took the decision to live abroad without you. I personally think that was cruel and unkind. Eat your cereal.”

“I don’t want to eat my fucking cereal.”

“Did you just swear at me, Sasha? Did you just say a swear word?”

“I wasn’t swearing at you. Or I’d have said this: fuck you.”

“Upstairs. Now. To your room. Now.” He shouted and she ran. At least it would mean she was out of the way of the move.

His prediction that Sasha would outgrow her fursona had been proven sound. By contrast, Gregg moved ever more obsessively into the fandom. A major factor in the size of van he’d rented had been Gregg’s fursuits. At sixteen, suddenly about a foot taller, he was finally adolescent. This included a long curl of thin goatlike hair at his chin and a few greasy hairs of moustache, of which he was ignorantly proud. Shaving in the mirror, Philip tried out the word “son”. My son, my boy, Gregg, my son. My stepson. My adopted son. Each sounded flip and phony, whereas daughter felt august and dulcet and earnest.

Their family began precariously. Philip found that he resented Gregg’s obsessions—unfairly, because at sixteen he’d had his own, had painted models of Napoleonic infantry, read Viz, idolised Mark E. Smith and The Fall. And he knew that Maria saw and resented his resentment. His sidewards glances at things he didn’t approve of were met with her own sidewards glances. Later these became comments.

For instance, after a night of particularly bad sleep, one Sunday morning Philip came up behind Gregg where he was sitting at the dining table. He was stitching a bow of pink ribbon onto the mask of his fursuit, and should have known that, since meals were so central to their family decorum and sense of itself, its sole way to unity and reconciliation, it was a faux pas to do anything like work at the place where they ate. Philip spoke brusquely, and Gregg jumped, not having heard him. “Do you think it might be time to move on from the whole furry thing?”

“What?” It was like acid.

“You’re a man now. Speaking as another man, who was your age once, you’ll probably find it a lot easier to interest girls if you let go and put the costumes away. It’s been a good hobby, hasn’t it? But you’re a handsome guy. Sasha’s grown out of it. You know, the girls at your sixth form might start to notice you.”

“They aren’t costumes.” He focused more intently on his needlework.

“Well I know, I get the personality and everything. This is not a criticism of you either, Gregg. Son. Gregg, it’s just advice.”

“Thanks—I’ll ask next time.”

“God, you don’t have to be so snotty.”

“You don’t have to talk when silence is welcome.”

“Suit yourself. I’m going to the driving range.”

He left it, and left. He hooked most of his drives, smashing his club to the mat in frustration. That evening, in bed, where a discernible but unannounced frostiness had pervaded, Maria, reading Thomas Hardy, eventually deigned to speak to him.

“Did you say something to Gregg today?”

“Gregg? Um, did I?—Yes, we had a conversation.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said he might be outgrowing the cat costume. Sixteen. Sixth former.”

“He’s incredibly sensitive about that Philip. What exactly did you say?”

“Hold on, why am I suddenly on trial for offering advice? I simply went up to the kid and said it might help his relationship prospects if he got over it. Surely the others all talk? He must know that, and he’ll not be pleased. It can’t be easy. But if he dropped it, it’d be like a reset. They’re at that sort of an age. Has he ever mentioned a girlfriend to you? Scrap that, has he ever mentioned a girl to you?”

“You don’t know his sexuality. He hasn’t disclosed that.”

“Oh come on Maria. Because he’s all incel you’ll pretend he’s gay?”

“What did you say? Did you just call my son an ‘incel’?”

“No, I’m sorry. That was over the line. He’s just struggling.”

“He isn’t struggling at all. How dare you? He’s fine as he is.”

“I’ll stop. I’ll stop talking. I’m not helping things.”

Maria took off her glasses and closed her book. “Gregg is absolutely fine? Absolutely fine. You’re not his father. Don’t pretend you can replace his father.”

“That hurts to hear.”

“You think maybe he’s into it because he lost his Dad at a young age? Maybe it provides him comfort, and an escape from his troubles? A different world, fantasy? Maybe? Maybe he likes it? Maybe it brings him joy? Maybe my son is happy?”

A knock at the bedroom door. “Dad?”

“Sasha, go back to bed.”

“You’re shouting.”

“Go to sleep, we’ll stop, we’re sorry.”

“Night.”

“Love you sweetheart.”

“Goodnight Sasha.”

Gregg didn’t go to university, staying at home, jobless. When she got to eighteen, Sasha was offered a place at Bristol, and so come the autumn her father was once again helping someone else move house.

When he’d brought up the last box of books five floors in brand-new student halls with no functioning lift, he expected they might go out for lunch. It was two p.m. Hybrid poplars outside the floor-to-ceiling window. Lichen-yellow. Between seasons.

Sasha pointed to the corner where he could put the last box. She said, “Okay, you can go now.”

“Excuse me?”

“Thank you for helping me. I need to get started on the reading list while I still have a few days before freshers’.”

“I’ve just driven you three hours?”

“I said thanks Dad. I said thank you.”

“I was excited, I thought we’d go out and explore Bristol together. I’ve never been here.”

“Well you’re totally welcome to.”

“Right.”

“I have loads of reading to do. It isn’t anything personal.”

“So back I go, Dad’s taxi firm, another three hours back home?”

“I said you can go and explore if you like—look. I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just a bit stressed, I haven’t done all the reading, and some of it’s really hard. There’s Faulkner on the reading list. I need to focus.”

“And you can’t spare your dad an hour? Really?”

Sasha slouched against her pine desk, folding her arms. “Fine. I’ll come. Fine. Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t want you coming just for the sake of it. I want you to want to.”

“So you’re making me do something I don’t want and at the same time policing my emotions?”

“No. I’m not making you. I’ll leave you to it.”

“Dad. Where do you want to go?”

He shouted. “I haven’t looked up every fucking restaurant and café and pub in Bristol have I?”

“Don’t yell at me.”

“It’s not about the fucking lunch or where we go and what we eat. I wanted to be with you and celebrate. I’m so proud of you getting into this fucking uni and. You know what. Forget it.”

“Dad.”

“Forget it, forget it. I’ll get back in the car.”

“Dad, please stop, we’re both just stressed.”

“Enjoy the term. Bye. Bye. Love you. Here’s fifty quid to go to the pub.” He tossed it on her bed.

“Dad, no, I’m getting a part time job.”

“Take it.”

He hadn’t, since the divorce, had he—cried? Yet he was, all the way home. Because to be a father was a cycle of hope and disappointment, terrible and wonderful, and, like all joys, part made up of the very best, and part made up of despair.

There was traffic on the M4, and he didn’t get back till eight. He came in without a hello, exhausted, trudging straight to the fridge and taking out a can of Heineken, cracked it, drank. It tasted like weed and metal, deliciously. Maria, who’d heard, came downstairs.

“The traffic sounded awful.”

“It was.”

“How was Bristol? Is she happy?”

“Oh, fine. She’s growing up fast.”

“I thought that.”

“What’s for dinner?”

“Ah, well—I didn’t know when you’d get back. You didn’t call, so. Gregg and I have already eaten, we had pork chops.”

“Right. Fine.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are there any leftovers?”

“Well, no, because I didn’t think you could keep pork—”

“Right. Think I might go out.”

“I can cook you up something quick.”

“Gonna go pub. Bye.”

Philip returned at one-thirty, drunk, but mentally sober because of the affront he felt. He immediately knocked over a standing lamp in the hallway, which clattered on the carpet and rolled round at its base in a half circle. He righted it, loudly, not caring he was loud. When he left the room Maria was ahead of him in the hallway, dressed only in a gown.

Admittedly, a hiccup was not the best way to greet her. Maria already had her arms folded, else she would have folded them again.

“Really? Really? You’re this mature?”

“I’m a little, little bit drunk Maria.”

“You’re pissed out of your mind. I can see that.”

“Yeah. Yup.”

“Gregg’s sleeping. Don’t talk so loudly.”

“Sorry.”

“Get to bed.”

“I’m just gonna get some dinner.”

“You went out to get dinner because there wasn’t any, remember?”

“They weren’t serving food. Kitchen being restored, what’s the word for it, renovated.”

“Fine. I’m going back to sleep. Well—I haven’t slept at all because I was so worried about you. But I’m going back to sleep.”

“Just some toast I think—”

Each time Philip texted Sasha, she ghosted him. She would answer calls—he knew she wasn’t at risk of anything, or missing, or other parental assumptions—but she did not respond to texts. When they spoke on the phone, she was curt, direct, short. She came for the holiday between terms, staying in her room, reading, silent, or out with new friends, kids with piercings who vaped; and though she was present at mealtimes, she wasn’t really present at mealtimes. One day he noticed she had a tattoo—a pair of subtle lips on one wrist—and he confronted her, reaching for her then pulling away, but shouting all the while. Yet she was an adult. She resisted him, and intellectually outmanoeuvred him (didn’t he always say he “cared about feminism”?), and now nearly nineteen was the taller of the father and daughter, and so, as never before, he felt like someone who was getting old. They broke off and he went to have a shower and when he was out, drying himself, looking at his face in the shaving mirror, he saw where it was loosening into lines the way a shirt creases.

This pattern remained for the three of her university years. At first, Philip felt he might need therapy. This was the courageous adult course. But, doing research, discovering fees and plans and commitments, the feeling shifted. Wasn’t Sasha, anyway, the difficult one, and so the one who needed the therapy? Once, a Friday night, on his third bottle of red with Maria, while at the gents’ urinals, he texted her as much. She didn’t reply. Why would she?—when he knew, didn’t he, that these arguments were arguments between himself and Sasha, but party to which Sasha wasn’t? But this ghosting: it was like a breakup. Only it was with your child.

On a claggy Sunday morning when they all needed ice, and hadn’t frozen any, and all needed electric fans, and didn’t own any, Gregg, Maria, and Philip were seated round the table in the kitchen. They were hardly doing anything, having had coffee and fruit and now sitting in the intimacy of each on their own phone. Gregg’s was the sole phone that made noise. He and Philip were shirtless; he was too hot, it appeared, for a fursuit. Philip looked up from Whatsapp. Even at twenty-three his chest hair growth was negligible.

He caught Philip looking—Philip looked away—Gregg got up—went over to the fridge, to stand in the blaze of its cold, and leaned inside. He had one hand up high on the outside of the fridge, as if he intended to climb in fully. He was placing his head in the cold.

“Close the door. The heat will escape,” said Philip.

“Come on man.”

But Gregg did begin to obey, and as he pulled his head out an avalanche of beers, a cabbage, a milk carton, eggs (a point of family controversy), yoghurts, Huel, and pork mince accompanied the collapse of two glass shelves. Beers shattered, covering the shattered glass with more shards of foaming glass. A beer in a can, surviving, dented itself on the tiles. The cabbage bounced surprisingly and rolled to a counter. One yoghurt pot imploded. Every egg smashed, eggshell joining the glass. The mince and milk and bottled Huel were fine. Gregg said shit and tiptoed out of the midden.

“Now what the hell are you doing Gregg? Fuck sake,” Philip said, coming over.

“It wasn’t me bro you saw what happened. It just fell.”

“The contents of fridges do not just fall.”

Maria said, “All right: enough.” She was the one to start searching for a dustpan and bin bags.

“He’s always coming at me.”

“Enough I said.”

“No. He’s blaming me for literally everything.”

“When have I blamed anything on you?”

“You always do.”

“Give me one example.”

“Jesus Christ I said enough!”

“Don’t say enough, Maria. Don’t try and silence us. I want an example. When have I ever blamed Gregg for anything? All I do is pick up the pieces. All I do is try to make his life easy, better, simple. You said it yourself, he’s not even my son. Why should I care? Yet I do. I put so much in for this fucking family.”

He was shaking—his temples were warm with pumping blood.

She said, “How can you bring up what I said in confidence in front of Gregg?”

“Because it’s about me, refers to me, regards me?”

“Fuck both of you,” Gregg squealed, pushing off a wall with two angry hands as he raced upstairs.

“Now look what you’ve caused Philip.”

“Me? He’s your son isn’t he? Not mine? Therefore? I have no responsibility here, or for him?” He felt that there was going to be violence. He ceased to trust himself.

“Be quiet. You’re idiotic. Childish. Pathetic.”

“I’ll kill you. Fuck off. Ungrateful—”

“Kill me then. Go on, kill me. Do send me to Heaven where I have someone who actually loves me.”

“I don’t mean, actually kill you, you fucking idiot.”

Shirtless still, and sweating, Philip went out the front door and did not come back until the sun had set that day, one of the year’s longest.

Because of his upset at Sasha’s silence he became upset with Gregg, and because he was upset with Gregg he became upset with Maria, and because he was upset with Maria she was upset with him, and because she was upset with him, and remained so, and they continued to argue for a week, thanks to her truth-telling, he discovered that, for quite a while, she’d been carrying on an affair.

It was the sort of thing you say when there is no arguing left in you. When to row has no purpose, but acts as colouration. No longer logic, but background. Not a scene so much as an abstraction. That which has burnt up the oxygen, admits nought else, and ends in blunt cruelty. The sentence she’d said was, “Yes, well, yes you’re so good to me, so good that I’ve had to shag someone else just to feel like a human again.”

He didn’t want to learn any more. He was to learn that separating from Maria meant separation from Gregg. You couldn’t but be close to a child, an adult now, who was your ward, and protective of him, and care for him, even if you had a certain distaste for his personality. Her affair killed his desire to continue on with her, and, therefore, eight years of step-parenting later: goodbye Gregg.

So he reverted once more to bachelordom—though now without a daughter. During his final conversation with Sasha, Philip discovered she was living with a boyfriend in Clifton. “Affording that how?” “Andy’s family’s got money, Dad.” Philip sent her £500 with the bank reference be safe. Then the calls stopped. He was by himself in a house which had swelled at its grandest to four occupants. No home suited so many empty rooms.

Over ten months, Philip made forty-two ignored phone calls to his daughter. On one occasion, pissed, he considered taking a train to Bristol. But he wouldn’t find her, or she wouldn’t answer, or to turn up would cause more disturbance than balm. Instead, wisely, he vomited on a car windshield three streets from the pub. Far enough from it to maintain his local reputation.

He also texted Maria once. He was equally drunk, only in a different way, sat scrolling her Facebook page with a bottle of brandy at hand. She and Gregg had been to Marbella. There was a photo of them on the quay, Gregg t-shirted and his mum in a tasteful sarong-style bikini. Yet she had a wild desperation to her gaze. Black, tentative, liquid eyes, of a kind Gregg shared in appearance but not in association. “How are u?” Philip said on Facebook Messenger, via which they had never spoken, as if believing it would reach her sooner by reason of being the same platform. It was not met with a response, though he checked every day.

Back in summer again, a real one, a June in which all the lawns behind the houses died, and the great local civic park resembled waste savannah, its waterless fountains now abstract monuments of hot granite, and the tree-shadows true black on the pastrylike grass, Philip was tanning in a striped deckchair, eyes closed, almost sleeping, when he heard feet crunch across the garden.

“Dad.”

“Sasha?” He sat up quickly, knocked over his pitcher of lager, turned, lifted his sunglasses to his sweating forehead, looked at her.

She didn’t say anything, stopping just before reaching him. He didn’t feel he could stand and embrace her. He wanted to so deeply. But she had in her face, her staring face, nothing other than anguished reticence. And, as instantly as she’d appeared, she broke into sobbing.

This was sign enough. He jumped up and grabbed her to his chest. “Sasha, it’s okay, it’s all right, what’s wrong?”

“We broke up, Dad. He broke up with me.”

Strangely it felt too extreme. Her crying seemed beyond the reasonable—dark, unsolvable grief. It didn’t have the one-in-one-hundredth spark of antic glee that even his divorce had had, the part of you freed by any severed obligation, the part perhaps called hope.

He said, “It feels like they’ve died, doesn’t it?”

“What am I going to do? That was my life. He was.”

“Nothing to do. It gets better, trust me. It does, it really does.”

“I’m just like you.”

He held her away from him. Held her shoulders with both hands, and held her at arm’s length, half confusion, half fear.

“Like me how? Like me in what way?”

“Mum leaving you. That’s what’s happened to me. Andy’s left me.”

“You’re not like me. This is a setback. It only hurts now.”

Through sobs, she said, “No, no, no. No. It isn’t only now. It’s been my whole life.”

Philip brought her back, held her, held her head and her smooth warm hair. “It feels that way, but it will improve—you’ll be you again.”

“I haven’t been me for so long.”

“You’ll be okay, soon, you’ll be all right Sasha, I promise you.”

“You’re not listening.”

“I am, I’m here.”

“You’re not. You’ve never listened. You never cared.”

It stung, but he allowed her to hurt him. “I do care.”

Sasha stopped crying. He had at last, once, one time, said the thing he was supposed to say.

Then, very coldly, she said, “Did you know, Dad?”

“Did I know what?”

“Gregg—all that time?”

“Gregg?”

“All that time Dad. The whole time.”

“What did he do to you, Sasha?”

“For years, and you didn’t even care to know? Are you serious? All the crying myself to—”

“What did Gregg do to you, Sasha?”

There was still listless birdsong about them in the bright harsh heat of summer’s hottest day, but the leylandii seemed to loom, into the garden, over them, and it wasn’t tanning weather now, in the shade of so many shadows.

Well, he knew exactly where Maria’s home was, of course. After their split she’d evicted her tenants and simply moved back in. Had Maria, the woman he’d loved for a decade, known? They’d had one awkward month before the tenants moved on, and he’d gone off to live in a hotel by the roundabouts by the DIY superstore by the edge of town. Was her protectiveness over her son the admission of knowledge? Philip’d had a brief depressive flirtation with a Polish cleaner who, seven days a week, serviced his single room. What sort of father was he that Sasha had felt she couldn’t tell him? She’d also been called Maria—part of the attraction—and had had a blonde bob and a young physique, thirty or younger, and wore not some fantasy maid’s costume but a simple black polo and simple black cargo trousers; he liked her strength, of character and body. What would he do if he found Gregg?

He knocked the door, first politely, then banging it two-fisted and deranged with anger. On seeing her opening it, that anger dropped, down to a seething continuity, like reducing the heat on burner from full fury to low flame.

“Did you know?”

“Philip, what are—”

“Did you know?” She began closing the door but he pushed back and stuck his foot in the gap. “You knew. You knew. You knew what he did to my daughter.”

She edged back into the house, pale with stark terror. He advanced on her. The lights were off. It was as warm as outside was. The air didn’t stir or circulate. She backed up to the staircase and fell and was sat on the second step. Her knees were together. She looked up at him. He felt coursing blind violence and wanted to lift something huge and bring it crashing down onto her skull. Instead he took the mirror which hung over the hallway radiator off the wall, famed in false repro gilt, and slammed it to the floor. The frame survived unbroken but the mirror burst into a thousand shards and each caught the sunlight through the front door’s window and showered them in a half second of crazed light.

“Is he home?”

“Who—”

“Don’t say who. Don’t dare say who—”

“Gregg’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“You do know.”

“At football.”

Philip found himself leaving. At first it was as if his body was being controlled externally, and he felt himself turn the latch of the door and step into the wall of June heat, leaving the door open and slowly swinging, Maria cowering within. But in a moment he began to remember he was horribly embodied, with a wet flapping talkative mouth at his centre, full of teeth and aches and shreds of bacon fat and trapped sesame seeds, smelling of coffee or mint or hangover, which he used sexually and in praise and in anger, to yelp and whistle and laugh; and the back of his right hand had been cut and was bleeding from a shard of the mirror’s glass. He walked down the long street past different dead lawns. At the far side of hot afternoon began burnt evening, evening still daylike in brightness. Gregg was in its midst, laughing, playing football, sweating pleasantly, sucking from a water bottle, playing, somewhere, among friends.

In the end he walked home, which was miles distant, far across town, dreaming of what Gregg deserved. Were these the times imagination was reserved for? His own was so moribund, bad even at recalling smiles and voices—yet here he could see his own fist with fractured knuckles, bloodied from Gregg’s face. He would pick him up, silently, drive him to a field, force him to his knees, take something long and metal from the boot of his car. He would see him on the pavement while driving and unavoidably swerve, knocking him down, reversing, going back to first gear, reversing, going back to first gear, as the bump each time he rode over grew smaller, until eventually the car did not feel him at all.

Sometimes, in the years to come, Philip asked: what would forgiveness look like? He found himself incapable of it. Forgiveness was for better men than he. Men less wounded. Men who, if he really quizzed his soul, had something quitting about them, some weakness which enabled their not holding on, which let them slip from their allegiances and brand it morality. Because to forgive meant to love Sasha the less. To forgive meant that he would privilege Gregg at her expense, pedestalise him, indulge him, pamper him—meant claiming that he hadn’t wholly meant it. He would not let go because he would not pollute himself with the admission that Gregg was in any way a victim.

Philip never saw Gregg again and he never saw Maria again and Sasha never saw Maria again and she never saw Gregg again. Maybe there would be a time when Maria never saw Gregg again too. They had lives to get on with, the four of them. There’d be children perhaps. Jobs, marriages, more divorcing, and more widowing. There would be driving children to swimming lessons and decrepit relatives to doctor’s appointments, and the putting up of pergolas in manicured gardens, and an endless stream of wine and gin and beer and, abroad, sunrise and sunset cocktails, and there would be tedious days of emails, and nights of insomniac remembrance, and golf, football, badminton, horse races, greyhounds, furry conventions, wedding confetti, exercise books, internet forums, winter clothes, christening gowns, car rentals, log flumes, greenhouse repairs, spoiled milk, gameshow applications, cigar butts, police visits, unread magazines, and fifty or so visits from Santa Claus.

And how did you go on being a father to a daughter, given what was given? Hadn’t he both ways failed her? Failed to know, failed to stop; and, knowing, failed in recompense, failed in redress. Funny that you knew which were the set pieces of your life. As something was occurring, didn’t you think just how blatant it was? And, guess what: there would be a grandchild, and another, not long off, and so there was a sure method of getting all that behind you. They’d go on themselves, and know nothing other than what they’d have to one day come to terms with in their unconscious heredity. As for Sasha, and how he was to love her, you found that the very truest, most bright red, most definite things were the things you never needed to address, and didn’t she have a wonderful husband now, and the little boys, and a career and a home and trips to see her mother? What of the hidden?

It would only be donning a mask, forever. They were to don masks occasionally tragic and often comic, forever, realising how much of the world was behind glass, seeing others as they presumed they had always been seen in return, listening unsuccessfully for the heart of life, mentioning much, and saying little, creating where need was, or likewise destroying, and carrying on both with a pain in them, of a different style, just beyond bearing.

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We sit in Audureau’s bedroom: there is only one real room, and so every room is her bedroom. Opposite the large comfortable bed is a large comfortable desk, where she has an upright Eames office chair, the leather cracked. On the desk are a fountain pen and two stacks of white paper. These are finished pages, face down, on the left, and fresh, unmarked pages on the right. She writes all her works here, before moving to a second desk nearby to type them up.

Other writers’ books are arranged in step piles, like ziggurats, in many places on the floor of the house. These little temples are waist-high; with their covers and dust jackets they represent some of the only colour in the whole interior. Audureau knows the location of every book within these piles, even those hidden beneath others. She goes to these piles when in need of a book, but can turn to the exact page number and paragraph of the line she is seeking to quote. The room’s lighting is strong. It feels as if everything has been done to prioritise books here, writing them, and reading them.

Audureau is fiercely tanned, with white hair in a fixed style. Against the tan and white, she wears black sweater, black slacks, red eyeglasses. She could be an ancient Tuscan marchesa, looking about herself with a rapid glare of hauteur. There is self-consciousness in the look; and, for all its steel, warmth.

The interruption at the end of our interview has, at Audureau’s request, been recorded faithfully.

INTERVIEWER

When did you begin?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

When I learned of my sexuality.

INTERVIEWER

That was important in becoming a writer?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Well, of course. Only homosexuals can write.

INTERVIEWER

You believe that?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

It seems to be supported by the facts. Wilde. James. Byron. Proust. Forster. Shakespeare. Marlowe. Hopkins. Stein. Woolf.

INTERVIEWER

Wordsworth, Keats? Conrad? T.S. Eliot? Tolstoy?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

There are counterexamples to anything. I’m not sure they illuminate so very much. It’s examples I’m interested in. Take Wilde. Do you think he would’ve written plays if he had been heterosexual? Or James—he might have ended up like one of his siblings. William, a great man. Alice, a sad case. The forgettable brothers. None of them artists.

INTERVIEWER

And what would you have been, had you not been a writer?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

A suicide.

INTERVIEWER

Really?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Well, it’s hard to say. Solely to have read, to have been a reader, would be rather like listening to music but never dancing. It’s acceptable, it’s fine, it’s even beautiful. Yet isn’t it wading out and fearing to swim?

INTERVIEWER

And going beyond wading out has kept you from suicide?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

It has given me something over which I am always wrestling for control, and which I never can succeed in mastering. Believing yourself to be capable of mastering it, yet knowing you cannot, ever: that adds a freshness to life. Without something like that, something drivingly inconclusive, whether it be writing, sculpting, composing, playing music, ascendancy in sport or games, even business—where would the challenge lie? What would stop outright hedonism?

INTERVIEWER

So writing is a way of keeping yourself sane?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Not sanity, as such. But if life is an unfailing continuum of applied effort, it certainly keeps you going.

INTERVIEWER

I’d like to turn to your work. You express your theories about narrative-as-rhetoric most successfully in All the Heirs, I think. This idea that plot is its own argument, that the way things happen dramatically according to a timeline in fiction is an assertion of a world view. Can this be realist while being distinct from reality?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Well, yes. One frequently finds that artifice is realer than what’s real. In that, as a manner of getting your reader to a certain emotional place, it may be more effective to do so with an outrageous, complex, convoluted narrative. The means may be unlikely, and rely on happenstance and coincidence, yet they can nevertheless get one’s reader to feel the reality of things in a way that a realer plot more simply told might not. It is the basis of all fiction. Take this an example: I tell you that a dog died. You feel nothing. I tell you my dog died—you feel, perhaps, a degree of sympathy. I tell you that he was my beloved dog, and you’re into the next degree. I make him real, a character, I paint him fully and dramatically, I explain his role and my relationship to him, and you come closer to how I felt upon his demise. This is where most novelists end their attempt. But I wish to make you feel closer than that, even if my means are not at all likely to have happened in the real world. I want to present him in the round. So perhaps you get the dog’s interiority—perhaps he is conscious, and his voice is the narrator’s. This would not happen, is patently unrealistic, but may bring you into closer sympathy with his death. Now, my works are about people. But what I’m trying to do is contained in that idea.

INTERVIEWER

You have been called a Neo-Realist.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

I have.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that a fair description?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

I object to the term, I think. It seems to me in error. I employ none of the methods of realism. To be a ‘Neo-Realist’ suggests reviving those methods. I would prefer to be considered somebody who goes after realism’s effects without being realistic. I suppose I am mimetic. Yet I wish to show things not as they are, only how they feel.

INTERVIEWER

You share realism’s objects?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

See. Look outside. The windowcleaner. That’s reality intruding. That’s how things are. I’m more interested in artifice than that.

INTERVIEWER

Your home décor is very minimalist.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

And functional. A warm room; wipeable surfaces; bright light. All aids. I shouldn’t want to limit what my work achieves by extraneity.

INTERVIEWER

So this man cleaning the windows—he’s extraneous?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

In the sense that he isn’t part of a larger structure. His appearance here, now, is basically at random. That is the sort of thing Joyce goes after. I cut the dead wood.

INTERVIEWER

You are perhaps most known for the microscopic complexity of your plotting, and though you say artifice, your plots never feel artificial. How do you reach that effect?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

It is like designing a tessellated mosaic floor, everything fitting to one geometry. The whole looks artificial if a single tile is out of place. You can instantly see where the pattern fails. Well, see: an individual point of plot is like the peak of a mountain. Say you take a woman discovering her lover has betrayed her. The betrayal, the moment she discovers it and they have their confrontation, is the mountain summit. But we had to get there, and letters, phone calls, rumours, the scent of another woman in the home, the lowering of the level in the bottle of lubricant—these are jagged instants by which we climb to that summit. Therefore no turn to the plot, no peak along the general line, is without subservience to other peaks. And a chapter I structure as a summit is in service to the main summit. Each is rising, always rising. There may be some minor denouement, or, at least, shall we say, rallentando at the end of each chapter. We move down a stage, or pause, taking a rest stop. Nevertheless the motion is one of constant rising. Finally we come to the main, having reached our highest height, from which we need to tumble, running breathlessly down the scree at the other side. Steepness decreases. Things level. We are open on a wide valley’s side with a clear river and deep green trees, yet our throat and lungs still burn. We pause again, finally now, changed, back to our original beauty, but having exerted, having been brought through the gorgeousness of challenge.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think you ever fail in your aims?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Frequently. I throw away nine-tenths of my work. It isn’t often something you can go back to. It’s rather more like trying to change the bottom row of a house of cards once the whole structure’s there. It’s too late; editing won’t save it. You only realise there are structural problems with that bottom row once you’ve finished the very top. If it weren’t so joyous, it would be infuriating.

INTERVIEWER

You find writing joyous?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Yes. In the meditative, immersive way. How you begin to feel a few minutes into playing a long piano piece. Nothing outside exists. People can talk to you and you can’t hear them. I believe this is how Jane Austen did it, writing in the parlour with friends and family carrying on all around her.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a ritual or particular method when it comes to writing fiction?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Early. It has to start early, before dawn. Hemingway spoke of this—of warming as you write. I cannot accept silence only, but need to know that there are few other consciousnesses at work. Farmers out scattering seed and collecting hens’ eggs; the fishmongers bringing in iced langoustine to Billingsgate; insomniac dogwalkers. The occasional financier still awake at a nightclub. These aren’t competitive with me. However, I do not wish to have that friends are up and at it. So I start at four, three in the morning. Otherwise there is rivalry for my focus.

INTERVIEWER

Do your friends pester you?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

No—I pester them. I want to know what’s going on in every life. This gossipy neediness must have led to my becoming a writer. Even dull people I cannot stand not to know everything about. Gossip is perhaps the basis of fiction. Hence the homosexuality I spoke of. I think it was the inverted outcasts, the homosexual men and women who sat around the campfires inventing literature while the uninverted went out killing bison and gathering berries.

INTERVIEWER

And the rest of your day?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

I sleep little. I write for five or six hours. That only takes me to eight or nine or perhaps ten. I breakfast and read magazines—the three worth reading. Then a walk or a book. I walk fast and quite, quite far, maybe twenty miles, which can take another five hours. This is to give me time to think about what I’ve been writing or reading. I compose a lot in my head on these walks. Finally I take great pains over dinner, cooking rich, French, Italian, or Spanish dishes. I read in bed with wine.

INTERVIEWER

If you don’t mind my saying so, your routine could be seen as spartan.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

It could.

INTERVIEWER

Has your upbringing had a role there?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Upbringings are tedious. Abusive or absent or too-loving father, or abuse or absent or too-loving mother, or both. That is all ye need know. You can skip the first ten percent of any biography. I needn’t know that so-and-so came from the rising or falling family of so-and-so and his ancestors ran a toothpaste company. That his childhood was full of hardship or else unaltering glee. In that the childhood affects the later work, it is the later work that is interesting, not the cause of that work. Plenty of tiresome people have had vivid upbringings. In fact, haven’t we all? I too was a child once: until I was not.

INTERVIEWER

At what age do you believe a life becomes important?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Oh, it is always important—just never very interesting. Of course, some people are interesting because of the lives they’ve led. Cortés, or Emma of Normandy, or Molotov, or Mark Antony. Their childhoods may have been the keystone of the world figure. For writers, the writing matters; for heroes the heroism. There have been two or three interesting children—Rimbaud, Joan of Arc.

INTERVIEWER

I’m trying to get at the importance of experience for writing fiction.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

What do we have but experience? There are no a priori writers. This is what I’ve been “trying to get at” when I speak of artifice. All writing is artifice. It is not pure expression in the way, say, dance might be. Writing is not primitive, no matter how bad. But I do believe in progress, at least structurally. We have learned things from the oral tradition to now—methods to minutiaeise and make more subtle—effects that turn on delicacy and lightness, as opposed to being bold and arrestive. For example, I think that George Eliot is better—more profound—more sophisticated—than Homer.

INTERVIEWER

Is sophistication so obviously a good?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

We are talking cucina povera versus the nouvelle cuisine. The difference between a shout and an utterance.

INTERVIEWER

Are you not merely talking about refinement? Aristocratic refinement as a way of holding at arm’s length bourgeois taste? And so in itself something false, something constructed?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Does its falsity make it less refined? Nor am I claiming that Homer is without refinement. It is obviously worked, obviously poetic and dense and beautiful. Yet we have learned to do certain things in the meantime. A sundial and a Swiss watch. So with fiction—we have more opportunities for ingenuity now, having learned the ease of complexity.

INTERVIEWER

Is it not ingenious to arrive at the Iliad without precursors? To, as you say, invent a sundial without anything before?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Yes—I don’t dispute that. But you would not argue that because Greek engineering was an incredible flowering, that because it became impressive, that because it had little to base itself on, it compares at all to modern engineering. This is where I’m pointing at. Why is art the only field of human endeavour in which we do not feel brave enough to talk about improvement? Put it simply, like this: is the nineteenth-century novel ‘better’ than the eighteenth-century novel?

INTERVIEWER

Yes.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Therein my whole argument about artifice.

INTERVIEWER

Your characters remind one of Balzac: butchers, secretaries, economists, postmen, housewives, sailors, medics, radio DJs, schoolmasters, actresses, mine foremen. How do you research the details of so many occupations? And why do you choose to present society as such a panoply?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

There is no point reading about such things. I speak and observe. I meet people. When I’m not in the throes of writing a novel, when everything is more loose and chaotic, I’m able to go out and make friends and try things. I’ve helped my local florist make deliveries. It taught me all sorts about flowers—not just recognising them, but which are appropriate at certain events and milestones, and the emotions behind giving and receiving them. In other words, I write en plein air. Like a Turner or Constable, going out in all weather to make sketches and imbibe—

INTERVIEWER

Is that the doorbell?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Yes. Hold on. [At this point we were interrupted by Catherine Jaywick, a former lover of Elizabeth Audureau’s. After some negotiating, she came into the house and promised silence while the tape recorder was working.]

INTERVIEWER

You were saying—about occupations, about researching society.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Sometimes, as you can see, research comes to you. One needn’t do anything.

CATHERINE JAYWICK

Oh please.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

You take issue with that characterisation, Catherine?

CATHERINE JAYWICK

I take issue with being called research, Elizabeth.

INTERVIEWER

Would you like to pause the interview?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

We may as well record her tantrum. She can read it back later.

CATHERINE JAYWICK

Believe me, I will not be reading an interview with you. I’ve had more than enough time with you inside my head, quietly screaming. Your endless unfolding ego, always there.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Catherine, seeing as you’re in the process of inserting yourself into my professional life, months after whatever it was we had ended, it might be that you’re attempting to get into my head.

CATHERINE JAYWICK

“Whatever it was we had”? Are you to deny four years of togetherness like that? Some cheap fling? I a pet project of yours, a temporary lover for the purposes of experiencing certain emotions, certain sensations? I’m not a tasting menu Elizabeth. You bought my children Christmas presents. Try as you might to maintain the rocklike pose of ‘esteemed author’, you were in love, and are in love, and banished me when you realised you were terrified of that.

INTERVIEWER

I can go out for some lunch, come back later—

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

It doesn’t matter. I think she’s done. Finished, Catherine?

CATHERINE JAYWICK

Why don’t you finish with all this charade and talk to me properly?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Because, dare I repeat the cliché, there is nothing to talk about. We are not lovers. You have appeared at my house unbidden.

CATHERINE JAYWICK

The house where I once lived. In view of the bed we once shared. You, you can give us some time—

INTERVIEWER

Yes, of course—

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

No, don’t get up. You’re more welcome here than she is. Catherine, this petite tantrum of yours is very impressive but there’s work to be done. You’ve interrupted this poor man with one of his great scoops—think about his career—he’s probably a jobbing writer like the rest of us—and here you are, in the limelight once again, with attention in inverse proportion to your importance. Let us get on, won’t you?

CATHERINE JAYWICK

Give me the answers I’ve wanted all this time.4

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Ask the questions.

INTERVIEWER

I’ll let you—

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Stay and record! She can’t demur from reality if the tapes are spinning!

CATHERINE JAYWICK

Was I merely of use to you? Was it never love—was I a method, a way of furthering yourself? Answer me honestly this time, when you have nothing at stake. Did I cook and sweep so you could write? Was I something to cling to at parties? Did you ever care about what was going on in my head, or are you forever too caught up in your own?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

You pose two things in your questions which you think are exclusive, and which are not. You can further me and I can be in love with you. I can be caught up in my head, near-selfishly, and still care about your life, feelings, hopes. You’ve always wanted there to be an easy binary to live to, Catherine, when I’m afraid the terrifying truth’s rather that we are all of us shades, gradations from kind to unkind, genius to idiot. Did I cling to you at parties? Weren’t you—aren’t you—beautiful? Did that augment me? Yes. But are you revealing anything now other than your well-known old fear of being second-hand, second-best, sidecar?

CATHERINE JAYWICK

You fucking monster. You take my heartfelt brave desperate enquiries and you turn them into cod psychology. Yet again. Is it that I’m fearful of being ‘second’ or that that’s the only way you’re capable of seeing anyone else? Your fear of falling is so great that nobody else can exist as anything primary to you. Crabs in a bucket, all writhing together. You’d rather pull down than lift up.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

You’re sounding shrill.

CATHERINE JAYWICK

Shrill? You the great feminist?

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

I’m reclaiming the term. You’re shrill. You’re steaming up the windows, and I’ve just had them done.

CATHERINE JAYWICK

Look, I’m not going to be sent away like a good girl this time.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

“Good girl”? You the great feminist, Catherine?

CATHERINE JAYWICK

Shut up.

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

Shall we go back to the interview?

INTERVIEWER

The tape’s about to run out as it happens, and I—

ELIZABETH AUDUREAU

How wonderful. Isn’t this what I was talking about before she arrived? About the artifice of plot? About how certain points are artificial yet just feel so natural, that even in their artifice—

The tape ended here, and the interview did not resume.

* * *

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