Like Luxus itself, the entanglement went on for much, much longer than it should have done.

Sometimes TBM would praise Harri extravagantly, sometimes he would ignore her, and sometimes he would put her down, quite cruelly. She’d vow that she was never going to speak to him, see him, or look at him outside work, then she would blink and be in a black cab gazing at the streetlights gleaming gold against the water of the Thames, on her way to his Docklands flat, where they would fuck like people in a play. She always felt like the understudy. Everything about his life was arranged for performance, which meant there was no intimacy left for her. Harri spent a lot of time telling people she was fine. She lost a stone in weight. The scratch on her little finger never healed, not properly.

But in the final days of Luxus, when she was pinned, not wriggling any more, trapped under the weight of her own heavy heart, who should turn up but dear old Andy, daft Andy, geeky Andy, Andy who Harri hadn’t seen since graduation, Andy who Harri hadn’t known all that well, but who once missed an entire Depeche Mode gig and stood outside the G-Mex centre with her, in the cold, because Harri was convinced that she had just taken some dodgy Ecstasy and might need a lift to hospital, imminently.

Andy’s work in the art department was so strong that it meant Luxus limped along for an extra couple of months. Over cheesy baked potatoes in the caff on the corner, Harri and Andy discovered they lived about fifteen minutes’ walk from each other in Camden, and that they had both just been to the same screening of The Leopard at the Curzon, and that they both had tickets for Depeche Mode at Wembley. She thought he’d married his old girlfriend from Manchester, a Laura or a Lara? She was Laura, they had not got married, she was now living in California with a computer genius and had three children. Andy had been the drunkest person at their very glamorous wedding. Not, he stressed, that he’d been drowning his sorrows, but because he was quite jetlagged, and Californians are weird. And the wedding breakfast had been very salady.

After work, Harri and Andy would travel back to Camden together, and usually have a quick half at the Elephant’s Head, then another, then a curry. Sometimes Harri might say ‘I really need a quiet night, I’ve got to put some laundry on, I haven’t spoken to my mother for a fortnight and she’s furious with me,’ but within five minutes of closing her door, Harri would be reaching for the phone, or hearing its ring, and the voice on the other end would make her think I don’t ever want to be away from you.