I move over to the gilt bar to talk to Denise. She’s that little bit more mature, it’s all in the clothes, thirty-five I think. I have a recollection of a dry confectioner’s sponge cake with the kind of pink icing that gives me an immediate migraine served up to me on a paper plate in the meeting room a while back. I often see these kinds of cakes in supermarkets in the chilled food section. It’s always the same at the office. Friday night, someone’s birthday. Someone I barely know. Someone that I have no desire to get to know. Who wants to know the people that you work with? All of these relationships end badly and that’s the truth. You end up getting pissed with them for a couple of months after work at the end of the week and you bitch about the other people in the office and you say things that you shouldn’t say. Regret is your middle name. And you are officially middle-aged now, bitter and bitchy, twisted almost. You go too far and you wake up on the Saturday morning with a bad head and then you remember the things that you have said the night before as your children ask you why there are lumpy bits in the orange juice. You want to puke.

The whip around after lunch for the present. The receptionist says a fiver is grand but she expects a tenner and you feel resentful because it’s not like a tenner is a whole lot of money these days, it’s just that you don’t really have it to spare but you’re too embarrassed to admit it, so you give it with sour reluctance.

It is no secret in the office that I kissed Denise at a party in the boardroom to celebrate the year end. I hate tax. Jenny is the only one who doesn’t know and this breaks my heart but I console myself that it’s something that happened a long time ago and it is meaningless. Vague recollections that Denise made the first move and the warmth of the prosecco that we’d been knocking back out of plastic tumblers purely because it was free kicking in. I cannot drink prosecco. Denise tasted like cigarettes and batter as we’d been eating a whole load of deep-fried finger food from the place across the road. I remember how my main feeling was one of relief. That she was kissing me, that she was taking the lead. I like that. So not Jenny. The thing about the deep-fried platter is that it allowed me to become greedy and undisciplined and I bit off dried-up prawns from their tails and I gorged myself on cocktail sausages and I shoved potato wedges into my mouth in between and in the end my puke was a measure of my greed and nothing more.