It was as if they were coming to the way they should have always been. Like they were levelling up into what they really were. Like the friendship and intimacy they’d had in those first years was some hangover from other relationships, like they’d thought they should act that way. That was the way they acted with other people who slept in their beds and brushed their teeth with them, but as they went on they realised there was very little need for it. Little by little, when they were alone, they experimented with less and less conversation and less and less politeness and it felt much better, much more comfortable. They still slept in the same bed. They still stood next to each other and brushed their teeth together and went to the same meetings and talked to Diane and shared one wardrobe. But it was so different from how it had been at the start.

They still had the knack, though. When they were in public they would chatter away and touch each other and be polite and what they observed to be ‘caring’ with each other. But if they went out, which they did no more and no less than anyone else, they were always happy to get home and be alone together and silent.

‘How’s work been?’ Peggy asked Heidi. They had almost finished their soup.

‘Yeah,’ Heidi said. ‘Good. You?’

19

19

They woke up each morning at the same time. Maybe they could afford two beds now, but it never came up. The flat they lived in was split in two by a glass ranchslider – which was strange but worked. They lived mainly in the back part of the house. There was a large room with a kitchenette, next to the refrigerator a washing machine and dryer, and next to the washing machine and dryer a door that led to the bedroom they slept in. It was odd to walk through a door directly from a bedroom into a kitchen, but this was the bedroom they slept in. There was another bedroom on the other side of the ranch-slider but this one was full of computer parts and computers. There was a lounge beside the computer-parts bedroom with a couch and a coffee table that Heidi had brought round for them because, she said, it was weird to have no furniture in your lounge. They’d never asked Heidi where she got the couch and table. She sometimes staged the houses she was selling, and they assumed this was an extension of that. Occasionally, they brought women home to have sex with and the couch was useful for this because, almost exclusively, the bedroom in the back of the house was for sleeping in and having sex with each other. Probably they slept in the same bed because it had never occurred to them to sleep in separate beds.