Something has happened, though. While he has been under the Anesthine, his wife has slipped from his side. She has been unfaithful. This was the sentence his mind couldn’t write. This was the hurt he couldn’t access, and now it is rising in his throat like acid. He thinks of her tights that evening, dirty at the knees.

I’m going to get an early night.

Puts his plate in the dishwasher, kisses her on the forehead, starts up the stairs.

My birthday is coming, she calls after him. You haven’t forgotten, have you? I thought we might go to Carluccio’s on that Friday.

Friday, he confirms, and goes upstairs to puke.

Brushing the bile and acid from his teeth, he stares into his own eyes in the mirror. They are the eyes of an explorer who has been on a long trek into the jungle and come back to find his wife in the arms of a stranger. Can he blame her? He has been pushing her away for almost two years. He spits. Frankly, Logan, it’s a miracle she hasn’t left you.

He climbs into the cold bed and sits upright, bolstered by pillows. Her nervousness at dinner tells him all is not lost. It suggests the guilt of a transgressor. Perhaps she is already having second thoughts. Maybe there is still time to entice her back. If so, best to do it without letting on that he knows: that way lies argument, recrimination, the risk of their splintering. The images coming into his mind are bad enough. If he has to hear her admit it, he is liable to get angry, and he has no wish to give her an excuse to leave. Plus, if he doesn’t appear to know, she won’t ask him to forgive her. The birthday is his chance to court her anew. Did she not remind him for that very purpose? His challenge is to win her from her lover, just as he first had to win her from Cunty. The thought stirs him to an ancient but familiar excitement. He is back.

‌Perfume

There are so few department stores left, they are almost museums. Once every small town had its own: a Victorian family business set up to sell every available thing, in the days when every available thing was a smaller ambition. In his boyhood, there was Benzie & Miller, Benzies to locals, whose maze of departments – dispensing everything from dining tables to corsetry, from kittens to haircuts – were, even then, closing one by one. The few London survivors are visitor attractions, for there is now nothing like them, and they will surely survive only on the footfalls of Chinese tourists, who buy from the display racks products manufactured in their homeland. He is here, in Chase and Munroe’s, because he doesn’t know what he is looking for, and hopes an idea might arise from the juxtaposition of meat hook and mannequin.