Each time I put my plastic key into the door of my room and take it out again immediately as instructed by the receptionist when I arrived at the hotel but the door won’t unlock. Even though I can hear a clicking sound after I remove the key I cannot open the door. It takes me three attempts to let myself into my own room. I fall to my bed and the blanket is soft on my face and I am much too warm. I set the alarm and I get up at eight in the morning. I have had two hours’ sleep.

I want to tell Jenny about love. I want to tell her about denial and my restraint, about what she is doing to me. Driving me away. Crazy. Not touching me.

29. Good Times

February 1997

Jenny was a dreadful cook and she announced this to me with a pleasure that I found endearing and I honestly believed at the time that there was something exciting about a woman who wasn’t bothered with the trivialities of creating interesting meals. Her passion for art seemed noble to me, somehow. She entertained me with her stories of culinary failure. We laughed about burnt risottos and soup with no real flavour.

She kept in touch with the group from art college and they met up every now and again. When she returned she was always in a good mood and I could feel her excitement as she told me all the news. I listened, not for the sake of it but with genuine interest. The group evoked a kind of vibrancy in her. Her eyes filled with concentration as she told me about various projects and collaborations that they were involved in. She was part of it and her inclusion in this set of people was something that I knew she was proud of and it was important to her and that made it important to me. She told me about friends who were sleeping together and friends who wanted to sleep with friends. And I listened, safe in the knowledge that she was happy with me, that I was enough.

And I believed it, I believed her. Her with her fine smile and the almost shy way she would reach out to touch me, to indicate that she wanted to make love. She did that back then and I loved the feel of her fingers, her touch was pleasurable in the extreme and it made me feel incredibly special. It was the simple things, the way she cooked when it was her turn, with a belief that this time it might be different, that it might turn out to be a success, and I graciously accepted anything that she produced and even if it was awful, I would act like it didn’t matter. And it didn’t truly.