For the dress rehearsal, Mr Koch affixed a dog hat made from scraps of brown carpet to my head; it had long floppy ears. Everyone around me laughed.

‘You’re so cute. Look at your cheeks!’ said a blonde girl named Kimberley, pinching my face. She was dressed as a butterfly: pink pantyhose stretched over coathangers to make wings, glitter on her face and down her arms. She tugged on one of my dog ears and smiled, wrinkling her nose.

As I walked through the school gates that afternoon, a group of boys started barking at me.

When the time came to perform, I couldn’t bring myself to bark at anything above a conversational level. Mr Koch lifted the hat from my head after the show. He’d been an actor too, once, and conveyed his disappointment without uttering a word.

The Heart-throb

Years before The Pure White Light of Morning, Tom was cast in a film called The Heart-throb; this was back when he was playing seventeen to thirty-five, rather than twenty-two to forty.

‘It sounds awful,’ I’d said. I was trying to read the newspaper, sitting on the living-room floor eating 99% fat-free yoghurt straight from the tub.

‘Don’t be so negative. It’s fun. It’ll be fun. Besides, my agent says it’s a vehicle,’ Tom said, coming up behind me, slipping his arms around my waist.

‘Like a sedan?’

He tickled me and I yelped.

‘What’re you reading about?’ he asked, staring down at the columns of numbers.

‘Stocks.’

‘They up or down?’

‘Both.’

‘Huh,’ he said.

The Heart-throb went straight to DVD. The DVD didn’t sell well. I patted Tom’s shoulder and told him it didn’t matter, but all the while I couldn’t help but imagine the leftover copies being destroyed, all those images of Tom – the blond hair, the big white teeth – slowly consumed by fire.

I Wouldn’t Do That, If I Were You (2)

It was a windy night; a branch kept slapping our window like an open palm. White Light had been running for two weeks; Tom had been receiving the first good reviews – glowing reviews – of his life.

We’d been out. Tom looked like Tom but at dinner he ate a chicken leg with his hands, ignoring the enquiring glances of other diners.

When we arrived back home, he let me open the door, then kissed me in the cold hallway; a hard and urgent kiss. He lifted me by the hips and pressed me into the wall, causing the top of my head to flick the light switch. The room was flooded with light, and we were left looking at each other in full colour while the tungsten hummed passively on.

Signature

People started asking Tom for his autograph.

He had prepared for this; one evening, I came home to find him sitting in his underwear at the kitchen table, pens scattered everywhere, practising his signature.