ONE DAY(76)

‘I should go.’

‘I think you should.’

Keeping his red, swollen face averted, he sits and nods towards the mess of paper, notebooks and photographs on the bedroom floor. ‘You know what makes me sad?’

‘Go on.’

‘That there aren’t more photographs of us. Together I mean. There’s thousands of you and Dex, hardly any of just you and me. Not recent anyway. It’s like we just stopped taking them.’

‘No decent camera,’ she says weakly, but he chooses to accept it.

‘Sorry for . . . you know, flipping out like that, going through your stuff. Completely unacceptable behaviour.’

‘S’alright. Just don’t do it again.’

‘Some of the stories are quite good, by the way.’

‘Thank you. Though they were meant to be private.’

‘What’s the point of that? You’ll have to show them to someone someday. Put yourself out there.’

‘Okay, maybe I will. One day.’

‘Not the poems. Don’t show them the poems, but the stories. They’re good. You’re a good writer. You’re clever.’

‘Thank you, Ian.’

His face starts to crumple. ‘It wasn’t so bad, was it? Living here with me?’

‘It was great. I’m just taking it all out on you, that’s all.’

‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

‘Nothing to tell.’

‘So.’

‘So.’ They smile at each other. He is standing by the door now, one hand on the handle, not quite able to leave.

‘One last thing.’

‘Go on.’

‘You’re not seeing him, are you? I mean Dexter. I’m just being paranoid.’

She sighs and shakes her head. ‘Ian, I swear to you on my life. I am not seeing Dexter.’

‘’Cos I saw in the papers that he’d split up with his girlfriend and I thought, you and me breaking up, and him being single again—’

‘I haven’t seen Dexter for, God, ages.’

‘But did anything happen? While you and I were together? Between you and Dexter, behind my back? Because I can’t bear the idea—’

‘Ian – nothing happened between me and Dexter,’ she says, hoping he’ll leave without asking the next question.

‘But did you want it to?’

Did she? Yes, sometimes. Often.

‘No. No, I didn’t. We were just friends, that’s all.’

‘Okay. Good.’ He looks at her, and tries to smile. ‘I miss you so much, Em.’

‘I know you do.’

He puts his hand to his stomach. ‘I feel sick with it.’

‘It’ll pass.’

‘Will it? Because I think I might be going a bit mad.’

‘I know. But I can’t help you, Ian.’

‘You could always . . . change your mind.’

‘I can’t. I won’t. I’m sorry.’

‘Righto.’ He shrugs and smiles with his lips tucked in, his Stan Laurel smile. ‘Still. No harm in asking is there?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I still think you’re The Bollocks, mind.’

She smiles because he wants her to smile. ‘No, you’re The Bollocks, Ian.’

‘Well I’m not going to stand here and argue about it!’ He sighs, unable to keep it up, and reaches for the door. ‘Okay then. Love to Mrs M. See you around.’

‘See you around.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

He turns and pulls the door open sharply, kicking the bottom so that it gave the illusion of having hit him in the face. Emma laughs dutifully, then Ian takes a deep breath and is gone. She sits on the floor for one minute more then stands suddenly, and with a renewed sense of purpose grabs her keys and strides out of the flat.

The sound of a summer evening in E17, shouts and screams echoing off the buildings, a few St George’s flags still hanging limply. She strides across the forecourt. Isn’t she meant to have a close circle of kooky friends to help her get through all this? Shouldn’t she be sitting on a low baggy sofa with six or seven attractive zany metropolitans, isn’t that what city life is meant to be like? But either they live two hours away or they’re with families or boyfriends, and thankfully in the absence of kooky pals, there is the off-licence called, confusingly, depressingly, Booze’R’Us.

Intimidating kids are cycling in lazy circles near the entrance, but she’s fearless now, and marches through their centre, eyes fixed forward. In the shop she picks out the least dubious bottle of wine and joins the queue. The man in front of her has a cobweb tattooed on his face, and while she waits for him to count out enough small change for two litres of strong cider, she notices the bottle of champagne locked in a glass cabinet. It’s dusty, like a relic of some unimaginably luxurious past.

‘I’ll have that champagne too, please,’ she says. The shopkeeper looks suspicious, but sure enough the money is there, bunched tightly in her hand.

‘Celebration, is it?’

‘Exactly. Big, big celebration.’ Then, on a whim. ‘Twenty Marlboro too.’

With the bottles swinging in a flimsy plastic bag against her hip, she steps out of the shop, cramming the cigarette into her mouth as if it were the antidote to something. Immediately she hears a voice.