‘I mean, here’s this woman who I fucking grew up with basically. She was there all through me coming into myself. Becoming a man. Yeah? And she had a lot to do with that. I’m not saying she made me who I am but it can’t have been far off, right? I mean, we got together when I was twenty-fucking-two. I was nothing. But see, because it ended so fucking terrible I can’t remember anything but what a pain in the arse she was then. An it’s pissing me off, mate. It’s like it’s poisoned the whole rest of the experience, so I can’t remember any of the good stuff. And there must have been good stuff, yeah? We was together for a long time. Know what I’m saying?’

He doesn’t even remember, like, stuff she said, so much. He thinks of Clio and he just remembers wanting out, how needy she got by the end, how she kept on slumping and crashing and trying to bring him down with her. The smell of her unwashed body after he’d been on tour for a week. He remembers that. Her flat full of snotty crumpled toilet paper and the seep of old alcohol coming out of her pores. The tears, caused by nothing, just existing to make him angry. These things he’d told Gemma about over and over, so he’d made them a bit more concrete, maybe. He couldn’t tell Gemma the good stuff, because you didn’t do that, and because he definitely wasn’t feeling it when they first got together, so maybe it had all just evaporated. What was the point of having good times, then, if they just pissed off?

It was fucking toxic at the end was what it was, he says to Calvin, and Calvin, who wasn’t there and never met her, says, ‘Yeah. Sounds it, mate, yeah.’