Just sent them. Also why won’t he give me his phone number, do you think? All he has given me is his email address and he doesn’t have wifi in his home!

What kind of weirdo doesn’t have wifi? I hate him already. It’s like those twats who don’t have TVs. Sad bastards, trying to make a stupid fucking point. I would never date someone without a TV. I find it positively offensive. People without TVs are pseudo-intellectuals who are too fucking stupid to realise that shit looks better when you watch it on a TV

I think he has a TV

As for those without wifi? They are addicts in remission

ABLUTIONS

The first time he stayed at my place he turned up with a paper bag. He shuffled in with it and hid it behind the umbrella stand as he slid his shoes off.

‘Been shopping?’ I said.

‘Just grabbed a quick shirt in the sale.’

I caught a hint of it, then: his anxiety. I’d spotted the pills in his bathroom: Diazepam. A little something-something. Why not? My mother had her gin, and I had my work ethic.

He stood in the hall, looking around, reading my life but also girding his confidence, I knew. ‘I have wondered so much about the details of this place,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to give me a moment to savour it.’

‘Okay.’ I thought of how, a few hours earlier, I’d been in the shower washing my body in preparation for him, and while I was doing so I thought of him washing his body in preparation for me, soaping his penis while I sponged my vulva, there we both were, separately preparing. I’d giggled at the absurdity of it – the futility of it, too, perhaps. It’s one of love’s greatest losses, every time, I think, that kind of fastidiousness.

Later, we kissed beautifully, awkwardly, our heads turning like sunflowers by teensy degrees, in front of the ten o’clock news. The best new love makes you feel fifteen again: clumsy, electric, conscientious.

I said: ‘Where are you working tomorrow?’

‘West.’

‘You could stay. If you like.’ It was Sunday. Teatime. I didn’t want to be alone at Sunday teatime. Suddenly.

‘Okay.’

‘Okay!’

We kissed some more. Then I said: ‘That’s why you bought the shirt, isn’t it?’

He went pink. ‘Well I didn’t want to turn up with a … So I bought a shirt, just in case. But then it was also just a new shirt – so, no pressure!’

‘It’s okay, I don’t want you to worry. Shall we both just agree to try and not worry?’

He grinned awkwardly. ‘That sounds good.’

‘I know it’s probably not possible, but it feels like a good thing to try and do, don’t you think?’

‘You are my dream girl.’