When the spliff was halfway down, I pinched it out and, without meeting his eye, I crawled over to where he was sat, back against the wall panel, legs stretched out. I’d bought a black dress for the occasion and now I knelt in it before him, my knees either side of his thighs, his face at the height of my breasts. I stayed like that for a moment or two and then leaned in to press against him. His hands came up around me and I pushed against him and kissed him hard, and felt a quiver of triumph as he reacted, as his mouth opened and his grip tightened and I pulled back only long enough to pull my dress over my head.

All the sorrows and hurts were outside and couldn’t get in for now. I felt them circling, pressing against the windows, but they could not reach me. In the past, I had struggled to want to fuck Marcus often enough or at appropriate times. It took drink or a spliff, a fight, another woman eyeing him. But I wanted him now, even though I knew it was the end. It was like burning the house you live in, when there is a storm raging outside in the middle of winter. Don’t say you haven’t wanted to, never had the inkling, the almost-knowledge that everything you love and hold dear is holding you back. Back from what? I was going to find out.

He got there. I felt him go, but there was still time, a little time. I held the dead weight of him, counting the seconds. A sudden and terrible comprehension of everything I was losing. My mouth was an inch from his ear. I wanted to say something, use words to hold him hostage. I knew the secret name he had given his bike when he was eleven. I’d seen his face, green with leaf light as we lay beneath the willow trees. But I wanted to keep those things safe too, sealed off from the present, so I said nothing.

Marcus had a few words for me.

“It’s over. I don’t want to see you.”

I said I was sorry about David. I managed that.

“I used to be jealous of him, of what you had between you. God, I wished you’d fucked off with him all those years ago, instead of hanging round to poison everything. I don’t want to worry about you or look after you anymore. I’m sick of it.”

“I’m sick of you looking after me too.” Like all the gratitude I had to feel, all the guilt for not getting better, had gone bad. Resentment, that between us he always got to be the noble one, the knight, and what that made me. For a glorious second, it felt that I was slipping my chains and riding off on the back of the dragon, but then it lurched back to feeling like I was in a film, that all that was keeping me from falling forever was Marcus’s hand gripping mine, and his grip was slipping, and then I had that odd dreamlike sensation, like in the second before you wake up, when you are finally falling and it’s such a relief.