‘It is good,’ says Nicolette, taking a sip. ‘My mother only ever microwaved me pizza. One time a boy came round and she tried to cook a pizza in the oven and he told me afterwards part of the reason he dumped me was because it was burnt on the outside and frozen in the middle. Which I think is a pretty perfect analogy of my romantic experiences to date. I gave away my sexual prime to Facebook. I’m a tundra on two legs.’

‘Have to say I sympathise more with your mother than the boy there,’ says my mother.

Nicolette drinks all her lemonade. ‘More?’ says my mother, gratified.

‘Yes please,’ says Nicolette, holding out her glass. My mother fills it from the jug.

‘Hey,’ says Nicolette, ‘so you do tarot?’

‘No!’ I say. ‘Not in my room!’

‘Oh, let her stay! I want my cards doing.’

‘You don’t believe in this shit too, do you?’

My mother pulls a pack of tarot cards out of her pocket and hands them to Nicolette. Nicolette squeaks with delight and shuffles them. ‘Like this?’

‘Like that.’

‘Soooo exciting.’

I roll my eyes and drink my lemonade.

SOCIAL CATERPILLAR

I started going online, drunk, at night, alone. Setting up semi-knavish profiles on dating sites. Stalking old spars. One time, in a stunningly productive vodka fug, I ordered fifty cardboard boxes to pack up my books. I skipped supper. I forgot the alarm code. Warning shots across my bow from the good ship Self Sabotage.

I sent away for a pack of those caterpillars that you incubate and watch grow into butterflies. Painted Ladies. I kept them patiently in a tank in the corner of the dining room, watching them slow down and slowly form their chrysalises and hang like seed pods. They made it look so easy. When they hatched, the butterflies clung to the side of the tank, drying out. If you kept them too long in there they died, but I released them too soon. Or maybe it was too late in the year. I found them dead and dangling from hedges and bushes. I came in carrying one, once. Art was in the kitchen, holding a pack of five beer cans by the empty loop where the sixth had been.

‘Where’ve you been?’ he said.

‘Work, then round at Kelly’s.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A butterfly.’

‘Looks dead.’

‘It is dead.’

He slept down in his studio. I slept in the bed – or rather I lay there, staring at the ceiling, stalked by my own thoughts.

He came in first thing. He hadn’t slept either. His breath was beer. He said: ‘Are we breaking up?’

I nodded. He started to cry. I got up and went to the toilet. The smell in there. In the end, it was like cutting open a shark’s stomach. Tin cans and toddlers’ limbs. Everywhere we’d been.

REALLY THO