Bram ushered us out onto his landscaped terrace. It has Italian terracotta tiles, a water feature, and conifers and camellias in glazed ceramic planters. It also has a view to the public housing towers in the distance and to factories repurposed as apartments closer in. ‘Have you noticed,’ I said, ‘that the rich live in apartments and the poor live in flats?’ The others ignored me. They were inspecting the camellias. A picture of a flower as formal and ruffled and white as an Elizabethan was attached to each shrub with a green plastic tie. Bram was complaining that he fed the plants a special camellia mix and kept their leaves free of dust. Still they refused to bloom: the buds appeared, turned brown and fell off. ‘It’s the pollution,’ said Bram at last. ‘It’s worse every year.’
That took us onto risky ground, so we fell silent. Bram fetched Negronis and olives and cheese, which required our attention for a while. The lights in the housing towers were coming on like signals for help. I watched a straggle of ink-blot tests cross the sky – where were the bats heading, I wondered aloud. ‘Kew and beyond,’ said Bram, ‘to the big gardens and fruit trees.’ Bats colonised a tree near my bedroom window when I was a boy. They used to wake me with their brawling. I let a little film play in my mind. It showed Russ, Porsche and Prada snoring in their beds while bats feasted and fought in their trees. Only the Moldovan, exhausted and insomniac, lay cursing the racket. One thing she knew for certain was that she’d never lived on a star.
By the way, the snoring is no flight of fancy – not in Porsche’s case, at least. I have Lyric’s word for it. Russ asked them to research cures for snoring because Porsche was keeping him awake at night. Lyric looked into it and recommended a white-noise machine. Oh yes, Lyric has unbent towards me. This is how it came about. We were the last two left at work one evening, and I was heading out. I was about to call, ‘Goodnight, Lyric,’ when something about their posture, as they sat there outside Russ’s dark office like a faithful, pink-haired terrier, made me go over. ‘I’m just leaving,’ I said. ‘I hope you don’t have to stay much longer.’
They were cupping their phone in both hands as if protecting something feeble. ‘My grandad’s passed,’ they said, still looking at the little screen. The strip lights had placed grey smudges under their tangerine eyes. I offered condolences and suggested a cup of tea. All the time I was thinking, Passed! How did this delicately spoken young person square with the Lyric I’d once heard grumbling that their fuck-buddy wasn’t free to come over that evening?