I shake my head. The time, blinking at me from the stereo equipment, says 21:10. As soon as the hour registers in my brain, my stomach begins churning. ‘No, I’m okay.’

He looks at me with a half-smile and taps at his mobile.

‘The local Chinese. They’re usually pretty quick,’ he says. ‘Am I remembering this properly? You like Chinese food? Or you did, back then, I mean.’

In that phrase, I am transported. Chinese food every Friday night – me and Grace. That had become our ritual, a way of creating a line of tradition to give our relationship the appearance of longevity.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Well remembered. Mabel’s idea,’ I say to Seb, who is scrolling through his phone.

‘Mabel?’ he says, looking up before remembering again. ‘Grace. That’s right. You called her Mabel.’

The fire snaps in the grate and a pocket of steam hisses from a shifting log.

‘What was that all about anyway? Mabel?’

It was months after having met her that she told me that Grace wasn’t really her name. Not her real name, but her middle name.

‘Hate my first name. Why would they give me Grace as a middle name and such an awful first name?’ she’d said.

I can’t now remember what I said in reply. The details about where we were or what we were doing elude me. In my created memory of it, we were walking somewhere beautiful, kicking autumn leaves into a slip of wind. I would have told her it wasn’t such a bad name, but now that I’m made to think about it, I can’t pull it out of my memory. It’s there on the threshold, waiting to be carried over, but I can’t quite grasp her name. How stupid of me. Is this the sleep or the kick in the head?

I called her Mabel, which wasn’t her name. It was supposed to be sweet, but she complained that it made her sound like an old dame.

Seb is perched at the edge of his seat, looking at me. Waiting. Interested.

‘Ma belle,’ I say. ‘It was supposed to be ma belle but then it just became Mabel.’

‘Ha,’ he says, then laughing softly, ‘That’s right! I remember now. She hated it.’

‘She did,’ I say.

There was something else to it too, but I can’t remember now what that was. Some clever thing about it. Maybe, some Maupassant, knowing how I am, something literary like that.

Though Seb was the literary one. Somehow, he seemed to have read everything, heard every piece of music, seen every play.

‘Do you remember that friend you had? Sri Lankan guy?’ I say, snatching it out of the past.

‘Thamba? Was he called Thamba?’

‘That’s him. And do you remember how he thought he knew everything?’ I say, smiling at the thought of it.