She leaned forward and tried to touch his arm, but wound up stroking the rich mahogany of the bar instead.

Soon after, my friend departed, suddenly wide-eyed and aware in her drunkenness. She’d left Tom a handsome tip, which he pocketed in a single smooth gesture.

He turned to me.

‘What are you drinking?’ he asked.

Hall of Mirrors

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

He’d taken me to a carnival and was concentrating hard on a stick of candy floss, licking the sugar from his lips between bites.

‘I’m seventeen to thirty-five,’ he said.

Maintenance

I was eighteen.

‘You’ll thank me for this,’ my mother said as we took our seats in front of the tall mirrors. ‘Trust me.’

A succession of ladies then spent the next several hours ‘fixing’ me. They fixed my hair; they fixed my eyebrows, shaping them into lean arcs; they fixed my body hair, buttering each leg with hot pink wax. They fixed my faint moustache by sticking a needle into each follicle and electrocuting it until it was dead.

Then my mother poked my protruding belly with a long, painted nail.

‘They can’t fix this,’ she said. ‘This you’ll have to manage on your own.’

I haven’t had a moustache since. But sometimes I catch myself staring out my office window, stroking the place where it would have been.

The Arrival of Alexandre Boulet

Before Tom got the part, I’d never heard of The Pure White Light of Morning – even though, as everyone kept telling me, it was a classic. An early nineteenth-century classic, over a thousand pages long, by the brooding genius Jean-Baptiste Dupont. I didn’t read books like that. I’d majored in economics and then gone to business school. I didn’t have time for melancholic sagas in which everyone gets to make a speech before they die.

One night, I was working in the living room when Tom walked in with the book under his arm. Usually he only read the sports section, or the reviews.

‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing. It’s for a part. An audition.’

‘A film?’

‘No, it’s a show.’

He passed me the book; there was an illustration of crossed, tasselled swords on the cover.

‘A timeless tale of rebellion and romance,’ I read.

‘What do you think? Could I play period?’

They’ll have to dirty up those teeth, I thought.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What’s the part?’

‘Alexandre Boulet,’ he said, in a mock-grave voice which was deeper than his own. ‘A nineteenth-century war hero, struck down by poverty on his return to Paris. In desperation he turns to crime, and becomes captain of a gang of charismatic thieves, Les Sangsues. Which means The Leeches. In French.’

‘Oh?’

‘Of course, he only breaks the law to save the love of his life, Mathilde.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said, and went back to work, my hands blued by the glow from my laptop.

‘Don’t you want to know how it ends?’

I looked up, smiled tiredly. I had work to do.