Kristi was from Albania, a slim woman in her early twenties with black hair cut in a bob, dark eyes and a prominent scar that ran down her left cheek. Of course, I’d never asked her about the scar, though I wondered about it in the same way I’d wondered what she would be like in bed when she had first started working for me. I’d hired her during a period when I was crazily busy with work, last spring, and had got used to her weekly visits, during which she mostly did my ironing, half-heartedly. She wasn’t a very good cleaner, but I liked her and imagined a terrible background in which she sent home the pennies I gave her to a poverty-stricken mother, so I kept her on, always paying her slightly too much and telling her to keep the change.

‘You want me to go?’ she asked.

‘No, no, come in.’ I glanced around the flat. It was a mess and I noticed how Kristi wrinkled her nose. What did it smell of? Perfume? Sex?

‘I will tidy up, yes?’ she said, frowning.

‘Yes please. Let yourself out, OK?’

I followed her gaze. There was a black, lacy bra on the sofa.

‘Um . . . Maybe just do the dusting and hoovering? I’ll tidy up later.’

I left her looking disapprovingly around the room. It was weird. Before meeting Charlie I thought Kristi was hot. Now she looked rather plain and uninteresting.

‘Oh God, Andrew. Why am I such a cliché?’

‘You’re not. Well, you are, but these things don’t feel like clichés when you’re living them, do they?’

‘That’s almost wise.’

We were sitting in The Commercial, opposite Herne Hill station, pints half-full on the table before us.

I met Sasha at university. She was the girlfriend of a guy on my course whose name I could barely remember now. I got on with her much better than I did with him. We liked the same things – the same books, music, art, all the things Charlie had said made life worth living – and shared a sense of humour. We just clicked. But we didn’t fancy each other, even though Sasha’s boyfriend thought we did, and everyone said we should be together. It wasn’t like that, though. I loved Sasha, but in a purely platonic way. This wasn’t because she wasn’t fanciable, either. She was very attractive, with straight dark hair, trendy dark-framed glasses and a curvy figure.

‘If I was a bloke or a lesbian I’d be all over her like a rash,’ Tilly said. ‘Actually, she makes me come over all bi-curious.’

Yet another occasion when my sister made me cover my face with my hands.

Sasha was a web developer, a bit of a geek, who also loved science fiction and video games. She was recovering from a teenage obsession with Buffy and Angel.