‘I have to confess: whenever we have a night out planned, I’m relieved when you cancel. I love seeing you, but I’m so … tired at the moment. There, I said it. When you’re going out the night before we’re due to go out a little part of me always hopes you’ll get fucked up and feel dreadful so you have to cancel our night out. Or you’ll get sick. Sorry. Or you’ll realise you’re too skint. Anything really. It’s nothing personal, it’s just I can’t really do this. It doesn’t make me happy. I can do a bar or a party for like half an hour, then I’m done. Do you hate me?’

‘No, of course not.’

But she’s making a face over my shoulder – is she? Oh god, is that daylight, now? When it gets light that’s the really grim bit. And my mother will wonder why I’m so late, but at least she will be there in the morning and maybe she’ll boil me an egg. No, not a boiled egg, I do not like the thought of that at all. Maybe pour me a cold sparkling drink that will refresh me and exfoliate my mouth. Yes, that would be nice. I swallow. I see that I have possibly been working very hard. I have been simultaneously trying to figure out the codes and rituals of a realm, an institution, whilst also trying to present myself as appealing. I feel very, very stretched and thin, like I might almost snap. I have been connecting, and connecting, and connecting. I’m like an algorithm system with feelings.

‘Nicolette, I’m going to go now.’

And I go. The failed pseudo- (antisocial) party girl.

On the way home I eat a pizza so hard I feel each point stab the back of my throat. It is my throat again. Boy, is it. I find myself having to spit on the ground shortly after – a big cokey, tomatoey gob. A woman walking her dog stops and stares at me, disgusted.

‘I have cancer,’ I say.

‘Oh,’ she says, understanding.

It’s not an outright lie. To be fair, I probably do, on some level. Most people do, after a certain age.

On the bus, pizza crumbs embedded in my skirt, I see a man who looks like Art would, old. He looks like a chamois leather thrown over a marrow. He moves his bags for me as I make to get off. He has learned how to be kind – I can tell by the pride he takes in it, this acquired skill. He is a social craftsman. I think: Time will take you too, Art, eventually. It will dampen your spirits. It will mock your desires. And you will be a better man for it. And I will be a better woman.

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