‘It’s stolen,’ he replied, enjoying my shocked expression. ‘Reuben helps himself to a few bottles at the Anchor when he’s helping out.’ He leaned close. ‘Just don’t tell his brother.’

We sat together at one end of the glass-topped dining table, eating an adequate spaghetti Bolognese that Ben proudly called his ‘signature dish’. As the songs coming through the speakers changed, he announced the names of the artists and gave a short summary of their backlist, their origins, and so on.

‘Is there going to be an exam at the end of all this?’ I teased, and he winced.

‘I’m trying too hard, aren’t I?’

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘It’s nice. It’s great.’

I thought of him comforting me in bed after our conversation about the Eldest Girls, when he’d told me he knew that I was a virgin. It was great! You were great! I think this is all great!

I put down my knife and fork.

‘Maybe we should just go upstairs,’ I said. ‘Break the tension.’

He looked at me for a long moment, unsure that I was serious, then grinned, made an elaborate display of dropping his cutlery and throwing back his chair. We left our half-full plates and took the music and the wine upstairs.

We did it on the floor. A thick, embroidered rug covered the boards of his small single room, and he pulled down blankets and pillows to keep us warm. His bed creaked and moved with him in the night, he said, and wouldn’t withstand any kind of – he chose the word carefully – any kind of ‘action’.

I thought that it would spook me, being on the ground like that, a reminder of how I’d behaved at the Customs House. Would Ben’s face become Saul’s in the midst of it? Would the spirit of that night come back to haunt me? The opposite. The similarity of our positions, the situation, the comparable fear of being heard or discovered, made the exorcism complete. This was who I wanted to be with.

It was only as we lay back afterwards, our skin sticky with sweat, my head falling to one side, that I took notice of the things he had stuffed beneath his bed in the rush to make the place tidy. Ben had not expected us to come up here, to lie like this – he couldn’t have done. There were carrier bags under there, boxes, a crate of dusty measuring beakers, an empty rucksack. And something else, resting just beyond Ben’s head.

I had decided to ask no more questions though; I had promised that I wouldn’t. Doubt only brought me uneasiness and misery. So, I chose not to see those two great curling lengths like dinosaur’s teeth, their ends tufted with hide and stained with the freshness of blood.

I did not see the horns of a goat.

Advent 2017

ADVENT 2017