I wondered how The Hair had managed to make it as far as our third-storey apartment. Had he smuggled it out in a pocket? Had he left it attached to his head? That, I thought, was a possibility, given how he’d been lately, silent and brooding, an intense, glazed look in his eye. He wouldn’t want to be separated from The Hair. He would have left it on until the sticky heat, the itch of it, forced him to tear it off.

Now, though, he was sleeping. I looked at the wig, bunched up on the bedside table like a frightened hamster. I reached out, tentative, as though it might flinch away from my hand.

I crept to the hallway and looked into the mirror, tried to scowl the way Tom scowled when eight p.m. struck and it was time to stride onstage as Alexandre Boulet. I’d seen it, just that one time I’d been allowed to see, how he left the dressing room with a sword in his belt and tall boots, glancing at himself in the mirror, his eyes lined, his face powdered, the place smelling of talc and cold cream and costumes that had been sweated in so intensely and with such regularity that the stains never quite came out.

I tried to sit the wig on my head. When the wardrobe assistants attached it to Tom’s, they first used something called Gafquat, which stank and slicked his own hair flat as an otter’s. No seam was visible between The Hair’s edge and his skin. On me, it just sat there – inert, lopsided, almost embarrassed.

I slipped it off, and settled for burying my face in it, smelling the smell that was his and no-one else’s.

The Labradors

Before Alexandre Boulet – before I found myself living with a man who ate only bloody steak, stale bread and hard cheese, limes, salted fish (no fruit, no vegetables), who drank beer and cider and wine but not orange juice or milk, who wouldn’t touch a phone or a computer, who almost never washed his hands – I lived with a man known for being cast in commercials with dogs. Specifically, labradors.

Often the ads were for dog food (Tom throwing a frisbee, Tom rolling in the grass, Tom snoozing on a couch with a dog at his feet). Once, it was for a cologne called Pine Mist. Once it was for a weight-loss meal-replacement shake. Tom brought home some free samples he’d received on set and I threw them back at him.

For one of these shoots I came along. It was an open set. I watched as they filmed him walking along with a blonde labrador, throwing a stick, retrieving it from the dog’s mouth, then throwing it again. When the stick became too wet and slimy, a gloved assistant would dash in and replace it with a fresh one; identical, pre-prepared sticks were stacked nearby.