She rubs her lips together and then pauses, the mirror still held high – she is thinking about me. She breaks into a smile. She lowers the mirror, still smiling, and I see the pictures in her head. The time we worked together in the admin office of the Further Education College, a holiday job processing enrolment forms – that was how we met. The short bald guy called Gilbert who was obsessed with her and used to leave bars of Dairy Milk on her desk – anonymous chocolate – and it was a week before we realised he was only the fucking Principal. The holiday we had in Corfu, which was a bit of a disaster because I was saving for my flat and so had booked us something called Bargain Fun – turned out it meant the cheapest flat possible in the noisiest resort on earth and so we bailed and went and stayed in a nearby village and on the last night in the local taverna we joined in a dance that was called something like dance in a ring of fire. The waiters lit candles round us and all I could think as we danced was that I was wearing a halter-neck I had borrowed from Rosaria that had one of those labels saying keep away from fire. On the flight home, we had a row about some money she owed me, and didn’t speak for four months, it was awful.

I rang her in tears one day, about a horrible Saturday job I had in a sofa store where my boss was a woman in glasses who was such a bitch to me, and Rosaria said she was going to come to the store and we were going to go into the woman’s office and tell her together just where she could stick her upholstered leather armchairs and she would have done it as well.