She tugged her sleeve up over her palm and wiped the window clean. ‘I don’t know. I’m really sorry. I – I’d really like it if we could stay friends?’

Leah didn’t punch the air when she hung up, but she did clench her fists, one quick pulse of triumph. She decided she would treat herself – though this was absolutely the last time ever – to a purge. Actually, she felt a bit sick after the stress of the phone call, so this wouldn’t even really count. Really she was just helping nature along, she thought, as she dug in her pocket for a ponytail band.

* * *

If, on New Year’s Eve, someone had told Chris that in three weeks time Leah would break up with him and spare him all the bother of ending things himself, he would have been delighted. But rejection almost always smarts more than we rationally think it should. Although Chris had long since concluded that the problems in their sex life had everything to do with Leah and nothing to do with him, he now found himself plunged into his old paranoia, still staring at the phone five minutes after Leah had rung off, unable to work out whether it was her frigidity or his incompetence that had ruined things. Because if it wasn’t the sex, then what possible reason could Leah have for splitting up with him? He had done nothing different; he had been, since the very beginning, generous and attentive and outwardly adoring. Apart from sex, and the incident with the Chlamydia – which Leah knew nothing about – he felt his performance had been fairly exemplary. But she had dumped him. She had dumped him.

Feeling very sorry for himself, he called Doug.

‘It’s over,’ he said before Doug had finished saying hello. ‘Leah, she broke up with me.’ As he said these words he felt oddly cheered. He was the injured party, he realised, the jilted lover whose friends would be moved and concerned by his stoicism.

‘Yeah, well, me too,’ said Doug bitterly.

‘What?’

‘Helen dumped me.’

‘Fuck.’ Chris was immediately ashamed of his own self-pity. ‘But – you guys are perfect, that’s not – is she crazy?’

‘Don’t give me any sympathy.’ Doug sounded furious. ‘It’s all my own fucking fault, I was online, I was using that website again.’

‘The one where you met Helen? How come?’

‘I wanted sex. Simple as. I’m a cunt and I wanted sex. And there was this girl who was really putting it out there. Only problem was she didn’t have a proper photo up – just a shot of her legs in these boots that came right up over her knee. Jesus. So I told her I wanted to see a picture of her first, and she said the only good one she had still had her ex-boyfriend in it. And it was me.’

‘What? I don’t get it.’